


In the faraway here and now

by ohnomydear



Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Home, Minor Dan Lewis/Anne Weying, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, On the Run, Post-Venom (Movie 2018), Road Trips, San Francisco Bay Area, Scott Lang is a Good Bro, Symbiotic Relationship, the rent is too damn high
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-08-05 06:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 47,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16363034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohnomydear/pseuds/ohnomydear
Summary: Eddie Brock keeps finding that San Francisco rent isn't forgiving to unemployed investigative journalists or their alien symbiotes.





	1. I took out the trash today and I’m on fire

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all! So, this is post-2018 Movie Venom, cause it’s the only one I know (until I catch up on Costa's run). Spoilers for the Venom movie and complete ignorance of that post-credit scene. Rating is strictly for language. No ships except for past mentions of Anne/Eddie. 
> 
> Also, I never meant to start writing this. I should be working on my main fic for Batman. Buuuuuut, after typing 9k in about a week, I guess there's something here to say.
> 
> The work title is from the song ‘In My Mind’ by Amanda Palmer. If you ain’t heard it, it’s the best. 
> 
> And the chapter title is from 'Good Day' by Dresden Dolls, sung by Amanda Palmer. I've decided the chapter cut off will be 8 chapters, so we don't turn into a 30+ chapter monstrosity like *cough* other things I've made.
> 
> For time placement, this is (somehow) after Ant Man and the Wasp (but before that post-credit scene) but before Infinity War. Takes place immediately after Venom.
> 
> Thank you all for reading. I... really enjoyed writing it.

It took a long time and Eddie meant a LONG ASS TIME, to try to convince himself he wasn’t a loser again. Because he wasn’t a loser. Had he fucked up? Yes. A lot? Well, yes, that was kind of how you got to be the director of your own network show and people stopped you on the street going ‘hey, aren’t you the guy—’ Yup, always that guy, always KNOWN as that guy, so hell yeah I’ll sign your (insert non-genitalia object) here (cause he was dating Annie). 

Now, of course, Eddie was ‘lobster tank guy’ and sometimes, on bad nights, ‘decaying chicken in the trash’ guy. They’d had A Talk about not doing that anymore, but he knew in his soul that the conversation didn’t signify any kind of long-term agreement. If Venom got hungry enough, he’d eat trash and Eddie would puke bones for a couple hours. Fortunately, Venom avoided it because Eddie made a shitty host in those circumstances.

They hadn’t seen Annie in months, against Venom’s ongoing encouragement, if you could call it that, to break into her home, eat the cat, and carry Anne off to have the unholy trinity of team-ups. 

Instead, Eddie had gone to his day job (like a guy who needed to pay the rent because NO, we’re NOT living naked in the woods, you psycho) and spent his nights drinking. Venom hated drinking. Logistically, Venom could stop Eddie’s drinking anytime he wanted to. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of things Eddie could do if Venom didn’t care for it. In reaction, Eddie gotten sneaky about drinking, paper bags and the like, behaving as psychologically normal as he could. The symbiote put up with it. 

Being with Anne used to mean that drinking wasn’t as fun. He wanted to wake up every morning, trade some banter when she got ready for work, and scamper off to his job. Well, not ‘scamper,’ he wasn’t the scampering type, but go to work anyway. Survive the day. Come home to her face and his ring on her finger.

Without Anne, with a gnawing hunger that never particularly shut up (cause yeah, he was still hungry, all the time), and unable to get out of his apartment’s probably-illegal lease, Eddie either drank or walked the streets. He didn’t walk by Anne’s anymore. He did walk from North Beach to Hunters Point once. Not the best idea: he almost got mugged four times and then he’d been in Daly City and a cab from Daly City to his apartment had run him $40.29. 

Venom LIKED walking, thank God. Anne had always complained that it wasn’t safe (and it wasn’t). On the rare occasion they took a walk together, she complained that the people Eddie knew on the street were people who thought lawyers were basically cops. Being a public defender now wasn’t going to fix that, he’d thought when she had told him, but said nothing. He wasn’t walking with her anymore anyway. The thought made his eyes mist up and he took longer strides so Venom wouldn’t notice.

Today, Eddie had made his way to Muir Woods. Entrance to Muir Woods was almost entirely based on the expectation that people would be driving, so walking here had meant he could skip the ticketing booth. He told himself he would mail them a check later. The National Parks Service was taking such a hard hit right now anyway and as a journalist he would know better than anyone the kind of political—

WHY ARE WE HERE

“Cause I like trees, sometimes,” Eddie said, careful not to move his lips too much yet, despite the mostly-unpopulated entrance. The beauty of coming on a weekday in November was that very few tourists would be wandering through the woods. Once he got further into the forest, he might even be able to talk to himself without someone calling the cops.

TREES 

“Yeah, those things we climb to get away from bad guys.” 

Venom said nothing else about it, which could mean anything technically but mostly it meant the symbiote wasn’t insisting that they had better things to be doing. Eddie entered the woods close to the Samuel P. Taylor State Park (which was still Muir Woods, to his mind) and headed south. As he’d suspected, very few tourists passed him on the mostly-flat (and pretty cold) trail through the trees. Venom Did Not Like headphones or music with high notes in general. Instead, Eddie listened to the birds and the squirrels, occasionally reminding Venom that his human host wasn’t going to digest either animal very well, and he walked. 

He placed at least a dozen miles between him and any form of alcohol, between him and the housing dilemma, but fortunately not between him and food. Ten power bars took up space in his small backpack, along with three water-bottles and an (emergency) Tupperware of cooked hamburger. Having an alien symbiote in his head meant he had to engage in the same level of preparation for a trip as the mother of a newborn.

I HEARD THAT

“I’m not taking it back.”

HAVE YOU SEEN ENOUGH OF TREES

“I need at least 400 more, then I’ll be good. Morning,” Eddie greeted as two female joggers came out of nowhere and raced past him in a blur of pink and jeggings. They nodded a greeting in unison. After they had gone, Eddie checked his phone to see if it was even morning anymore and was surprised to find that it was already three in the afternoon. “Holy shit.”

IT’S BEEN HOURS OF TREES, EDDIE. VERY BORING

“Mm, guess that’s your problem…” Eddie took one of the power bars out of his backpack and continued walking. “But I’ll keep an eye out for exits. NO, DON’T—” 

From the vantage point of the top of a redwood, he did nothing more than cling to the branches until, moodily, Venom forced him to look around. “We’re not that far from the coast,” Eddie admitted after several minutes of sheer terror. “Another couple of hours. Looks like there’s a whole town over there.”

HUNGER

“Yeah, I’ll eat the hamburger when we’re on the ground, you’ll be fine.” He began the miserably-slow climb down, hearing Venom making irritable sounds about his speed in the back of his mind. “We said at the damn beginning that I was not good with heights!” 

EXPOSURE THERAPY

“Who the hell taught you THAT?!”

“Hello-o-o-o?” came a voice from somewhere a hundred of feet below. “Is someone up there-e-e-e?” 

“Shit,” Eddie muttered, fingernails digging into the tree. “I’m not leaning back to yell at them. They’re gonna have to go away on their own power.” 

I COULD MAKE THEM

“Damnit, I’m sure you could, but they’re trying to be NICE.” Eddie braced his cheek against the tree and didn’t move. “They’ll forget I’m here.”

“I ca-a-a-a-lled the Par-r-r-rk!” the person below shouted up to him. “Ha-a-a-ang on-n-n-n!”

Eddie banged his forehead against the tree before remembering to take a deep breath for patience, like the meditation CD Mrs. Chen had given him—

THAT’S A GOOD CD.

“Just doing some investigative journalism!” he shouted down to the person, keeping his eyes tightly closed. “I’m Eddie Brock and I’m JUST FINE!”

“The lobster guy?!” another voice called up. It sounded like a damn kid.

Maybe he should just let go, Eddie theorized. Venom would probably catch him on the way down or fix him if he didn’t; the person’d be a little traumatized but hey, at least people would talk about Eddie Brock’s death rather than the lobster tank excursion.

DO IT

“Uh…” Even if there weren’t repercussions, Eddie still hated the idea of falling the remaining hundred to two hundred feet onto a forest floor – or possibly falling at lethal speed onto a concerned individual.

“I’m a professional!” he yelled down instead. A professional ‘what’ was another matter entirely. 

HUNGER

Eddie made a noise of absolute frustration, eliciting immediate and extreme panic from the person far below, and then spent several minutes trying to tell them he was fine – God, he wanted them to go away. Inching his way south, he made it to the next branch and crouched there, not looking down. 

WE’RE JUMPING

“No, we’re NOT,” Eddie said, digging his fingernails into the bark even as Venom tried to loosen his arms. “It’s gonna suck being a symbiote to a guy with no fingernails, I can GUARANTEE it!”

“A-a-a-are you-u-u-u oka-a-a-a-y-y-y-y?!”

“FINE!” Eddie screamed, even as he felt the symbiote pry at his fingers until he felt himself slipping. “RUN!”

His grip came loose and he felt the sinking feeling he’d felt in so many of these reflux-inducing incidents; when he refused to lie on his stomach and look over sheer walls on school trips, when he went numb as people encouraged him to ‘admire the view’ from their penthouse suite and he chanced to look down—

YOU’RE STARVING US BREATHE EDDIE

His host took a shuddering breath as they fell – and then Venom was leaping down the tree with the ability of a team of gymnasts. Venom landed on the forest floor with a significant part of his weight, denting the earth with a small crater. The symbiote always felt satisfied with the fact he could land with the weight of a heavy motorcycle, crushing all in his path. His host, on the other hand, could be knocked off course with something as simple as a baseball bat. The human man staring up at them looked significantly alarmed while the smaller human next to him looked excited. 

“What the hell!” the human man shouted, taking a step backwards and shielding the smaller companion.

“Daddy?” the small female looked up at the older human male in confusion. “Is this a bad guy?”

Eddie shouted in the back of the symbiote’s mind: ‘no no no these aren’t bad guys DO NOT BITE HER HEAD OFF. OR HIS.’

“We are not a… bad guy,” Venom said slowly. The little female looked skeptical, but the male looked relieved.

“Good. Uh, anybody else up there?”

‘tell him you took me to safety!’ Eddie shouted, 

“I took the journalist to safety. He was very stupid,” Venom said, carefully enunciating each of the words. 

“Great, y’know, cause I didn’t want a fight today. Geez, San Francisco. Didn’t think we’d have an Ant-man and a Daredevil and a… dunno who you are, dude.” The human male didn’t see entirely convinced by Venom’s explanation but the smaller human affected his behavior. 

“We are Venom,” the symbiote said, not feeling one way or the other about the statement, though it could feel their other half feeling strangely about it. “We are… a protector.” 

‘Oh, is THAT what you are,’ Eddie said sardonically. Just to underline the point, Venom waved as the pair kept walking, continuing to wave until the symbiote was absolutely sure the human male and smaller human could not see them anymore. Then he dropped Eddie into the body, his host going face-first into the debris of the forest floor.

YES THAT IS WHAT I AM

“No more redwoods!!”

IF YOU CAN GET TO THE TOWN

Eddie started at a good clip in the direction of the town, refusing to talk to Venom. Venom agreeably didn’t say anything until Eddie had made it, out of breath, to the town around eight in the evening. The journalist headed into the nearest bar, something with no name, since it looked like less of a tourist joint than the entire rest of the town. 

Eddie sank gratefully onto one of the bar stools and ordered a whiskey. Then, as an afterthought, doubled it. 

WE HAVE NOWHERE TO SLEEP

Eddie held onto the steel handrail over the bar with a tenacity that made the barkeeper look over in concern. “Don’t care.”

EDDIE YOU AREN’T STAYING HERE

“Sure you haven’t been drinkin’ already?” the barkeeper asked, even as he poured Eddie his double.

“Just a rough day,” Eddie said. “You could give me a breathalyzer right now and you’d only come up with some messy neuroses.”

“Whatever you say, bro,” the barkeeper said, sliding Eddie the drink. “Just mind your manners for the tourists. There’s not a lot of ‘em, but they probably tip better.”

I AM NOT A NEUROSIS

“One drink, we’ll go,” Eddie told the symbiote, then tried to take a sip. The whiskey splashed all over his face as Venom shoved the glass away. “Hey!”

WE DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR YOUR MEWLING

Eddie slammed a $20 bill on the counter even as the symbiote yanked him away from the bar. “Sorry, sorry!” The barkeeper looked at the counter then, without expressing any hint of alarm, said: “No worries man, that’s a good tip.”

They took only a few steps before Venom dragged them both above the town, to the highest point he could find. This wasn’t that high, and certainly not high compared to the buildings of San Francisco proper, or even the mountains that loomed behind the town. They sat on top of a bank, probably looking like a gargoyle, if the gargoyle happened to be off-duty in a California beach city.

WHICH WAY BACK

‘oh sorry did you want to go HOME now?’ Eddie commented dryly.

HOMELESS

The statement had an inquisitive tone, as if Venom was wondering if he would be leaving Eddie on the (not unfriendly but not entirely kind) streets of Sausalito for the night.

Eddie sighed heavily. ‘home is towards those lights to the south and a little east. there’s that big bridge on what’ll be our left’

Eddie felt the symbiote take a running start to dive into the frigid water, alarming what few tourists had decided to stay on the beach. After a significant period of swimming, probably past Alcatraz Island on the left and the Marin headlands on the right, Venom growled.

WHY DID WE COME SO FAR FOR TREES

‘there aren’t a lot of trees in san francisco,’ Eddie replied. ‘and I could get there without the bike’

MMNGH

‘we’re going to be homeless in a little under a week if we can’t meet rent,’ Eddie said. ‘and by we, I mean ME. I thought it was best to consider our options.’

YOU CAN’T AFFORD THAT SHIT

‘not sausalito. I thought we could live in muir woods,’ Eddie said without missing a beat. ‘cheaper damn rent than san francisco.’

IN THE TREES

‘the forest actually. lots of animals live in the forest and if we’re CAREFUL—’ 

YOU WILL DIE IN THE FOREST

‘thanks, thanks for putting it that way, bud, appreciate it. yeah, I’d probably die there but you’d be fine.’

MNH. 

Eddie was beginning to recognize this sound as Venom thinking – which didn’t come naturally. 

‘we’d be fine. it’s a big, big place’

YOU SHOULD LOOK FOR OTHER HOUSING FOR US


	2. Acquainted with the night, but I have seen the darkness in the day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from 'Astronaut' by Amanda Palmer. 
> 
> Thank you for the kudos, and for reading!

Eddie did look for other housing that they could afford. He didn’t find any. Venom resisted any indication that Eddie would take them back to the woods, even getting suspicious whenever Eddie pulled up maps and bus schedules on the laptop. Meanwhile their eviction notice crept closer and closer. 

The apartment was no prize, what with history of the dead bodies and broken window and paper-thin walls, but the rent was still creeping up to $3,000 for his one-bedroom and would hit $3,000 on the upcoming month. It didn’t take a math genius to realize Eddie’s income of $2,100 (on a good month) wasn’t going to hold up for long. He couldn’t take a side job, as doing his ‘standard’ job had odd hours and he seriously wondered if Venom would spend most of a service job’s shifts sabotaging customers.

Venom’s suggestions for solving the housing issue ranged from ‘SLEEP IN THE CARCASS OF THE LIFE FOUNDATION WE HAVE CLAIMED IT AS OUR OWN’ to ‘RECLAIM ANNE’S DWELLING AND CLAIM HER AS YOUR OWN IF SHE WILL HAVE A LOSER LIKE YOU’ and… just other solutions that weren’t socially acceptable or very Brock-acceptable.

He returned from back-to-back interviews on the 30th to find the eviction notice on the door. Venom said nothing as Eddie tore it to shreds and headed up to the apartment to see what he could move in thirteen hours. He’d seen other people evicted from the building; he just always thought he and Anne would be married by now and he wouldn’t have to be apartment-hunting. Yeah, fine, it’d been eight months, but he had held out a stupid sort of hope for them.

For a journalist, it wasn’t hard to determine what Mattered vs. what was Nice To Have. Legal documentation, laptop, motorcycle keys, phone charger, cash stash, proprietary notebooks, and any nonperishable foods he had in the house that would fit in his beat-up backpack. Oh, and socks, at least nine pairs of underwear, and two changes of clothes. He stared at the pile of clothing, then scowled, debating pulling the suitcase out of the closet. He’d need it. But it’d slow him down (how would he get it on the bike?). Whatever Venom ended up doing, he’d lose it anyway. Better to keep the backpack and tell Venom THAT was the only thing he should keep track of, no matter what. Venom could probably handle a backpack.

A SUITCASE. The symbiote, unsurprisingly, sounded disgusted with the idea. WHAT ARE YOU A GIRL

“No, just someone who likes having enough clean clothes!” Eddie snapped back. “The longer I go without them, the harder it’ll be for me to find somewhere to live. Or to keep my job.”

THAT MAKES NO SENSE

“Welcome to San Francisco!” Because Eddie’s mind had already gone to the rows and rows of people experiencing homelessness; people who had come to San Francisco like he had because they had a job opportunity or they thought they were going to make it rich in the tech industry or, worse, they had made it rich here and lost it. 

He’d burned too many bridges to go back to New York. If the people paying attention to his work suspected he couldn’t keep his personal life stable, they’d find some other beat reporter. Style and straight talk was great, but you couldn’t always pay the bills with straight talk; he wasn’t that Trish Walker chick.

He shouldered his backpack which was, let’s be honest, much heavier than the structural integrity advised it to be, and started walking. He went by Mrs. Chen’s and picked up some supplementary meat for the demon (NOT A DEMON) and told her he’d see her the next day (YOU DON’T KNOW THAT EDDIE) before heading for the Riviera Hotel, dropping the bike off some six blocks away. He could afford the hotel (whoohoo?) but that part of the Tenderloin wasn’t the type of area anyone in their right mind would walk through after seven at night. Venom took them across the rooftops. Not for the first time, Eddie was sincerely glad the symbiote was dark enough to be invisible against the night sky.

Eddie got the key from the crowded hotel lobby, then moved carefully to the stairwell, all the while trying to keep Venom from… well, ‘activating’ on anyone. The lobby… looked bad, he wasn’t about to argue that, but there was a massive difference between a psychopath and someone who needed to find some chemical dependency treatment. He explained this briefly to Venom, as he climbed the stairs, trying to avoid too many of his words carrying up the stairwell. Venom at least didn’t deem his explanations unacceptable and they made it up to their room with a minimal number of hostile encounters, with the worst incident simply that he had shown a few more teeth than the aggressor had expected to see.

Eddie bolted the door, then latched the window, then moved a chair under the doorknob and put the backpack under the bed with the strap in easy reach. Then he dragged the bed in front of the window.

THIS PLACE SUCKS

“Well aware.”

ANNIE LIKES US. SHE WOULD LET US STAY

“I’m going to sleep, you wanna pretend that Annie would let us crash on her couch in the house she lives in with Dan, be my guest.” Eddie eyed the bed for a minute, removed one of the sheets from it and one of the jackets from his backpack, and made a bed on the floor which, thank God, was hardwood rather than trashy carpet.

YOU’LL GET SICK AGAIN

“No, I’ll get some sleep, that’s what’s happening here.” He pushed the jacket over his ears as somewhere, probably four flights below, someone cranked up their EDM. Venom let him sit for probably forty-five minutes as the symbiote ate some of the protein he’d picked up from Mrs. Chen’s, opened the window and explored the outside of the building for a while, before coming back in and closing the window. Eddie lay still awake, staring at the ceiling. 

This continued until six in the morning, when he dragged himself out of “bed” to use the toilet and found a large collection of spiders living in the dry bowl. He stormed out and jogged down the stairs, backpack slung over his shoulder. At this hour of the morning, fewer people were up and he made it to the lobby without incident, throwing the keys in the dropbox.

WHY NOT STEAL THEM

“They always have a second set and they’ll call the police or change the lock. Or both.” He headed out of the Tenderloin; there was a safer environment at this early hour of the morning. He’d had to walk through here for interviews before and as long as he parked his motorcycle somewhere else and didn’t flash valuables or look like somebody who’d have any, he was fine.

WE ARE NOT FINE

“Sorta fine, sorta fine,” Eddie replied, continuing to walk. “See, this is why Muir Woods was a good idea.”

STOP

He stopped. They’d come to an agreement about stopping because Venom exerting energy to forcibly stop him every time just made them both hungry. In return, Venom wasn’t supposed to use the word for chocolate, small animals he wanted to eat, or insults. See, there was a reason it’d taken Eddie so long to reconvince himself he wasn’t a loser. With this housing issue, that belief was quickly backsliding. 

“What’s up?”

ON YOUR LEFT

Eddie looked and felt confused for a minute, which had happened more and more often lately. He knew the man waving at him, knew he’d interviewed him before, knew he’d seen him recently. It made sense he was in this area, but Eddie didn’t know why; he didn’t know that many people who lived in this part of town. He approached the man anyway, pasting on the usual grin just in case this guy had some sort of authority. He didn’t remember the man being a jerk or a crook anyway…

“How’s it going, Eddie?” The man had dark, very short hair, and the kind of face that could’ve gotten him a role on Friends. He was also way friendlier than he should be for this neighborhood. 

“Y’know, I know we’ve met, but I’m guessing it’s been a while… you do something electrical engineering, right?” 

The way the guy’s face lit up, he was definitely doing electric engineering something or other.

THIS IS THE HUMAN FROM THE WOODS

Venom said it with substantial conviction. Eddie went pale. Right. That’s where he’d seen the man recently, filtered through Venom’s eyes, and the voice matched the person who had been yelling up to him last night. Damnit damnit damnit.

“Scott Lang,” the other man said, extending his hand. “We met when I was trying to get out the word about VistaCorp.”

Somebody else with his cell phone number, Eddie thought, trying to tamp down the panic. Great. “Yeah, the overcharging Robin Hood operation, I remember now. Network wouldn’t let me touch it.”

“It’s cool, bro, I did the crime, I did the time. What about you? I heard about the Life Foundation, sounded intense.”

HUNGRY

“You’re always hungry,” Eddie said quietly, then covered up the Life Foundation question as best he could. “All in the line of investigative journalism. How’s your daughter doing?”

“Wants to be an Avenger,” Scott said with a laugh. “Can’t stop kids.”

“Just keep her away from creepos selling alien symbiotes and she should be fine.” Eddie glanced a little further down the street and then back at Scott. “I’ve gotta find some food.”

“I’m doing the same thing.” Lang motioned vaguely in the direction of several streets over. “Can be tricky to find if you’re not a local. I can show you.”

MEAT, Venom said but it was the last thing on Eddie’s mind. He hadn’t meant to get suckered into having a meal with Lang, who would probably bring up Muir Woods at any minute.

“Not vegetarian, right?” Eddie asked, hoping that Scott was a typical Californian and all health food and—

“Not last I checked.”

Damn. “Good.” Eddie forced another smile as he felt into step beside Lang. “California, y’know, never know what you’re gonna get.” The man’s pace was swift and he was the type to walk straight through crosswalks so Eddie had to jog after him, looking around for cars frantically.

“Yeah, I ran into something like that a week ago, matter of fact,” Lang said, going for casual.

Oh God, he definitely knew. “Hey, before we get on that, you never mentioned what you ended up doing for work. I know jobs for ex-cons are hard to come by, so I’m a little concerned you’re in the Tenderloin.” 

Scott brightened up again. “I started a security company for other ex-cons! It’s really starting to take off, got enough to afford coffee for everybody once a week. Getting some big clients too.”

NOT SUBWAY 

Venom had spotted the trajectory of their path and began tugging Eddie slightly off-course, towards the teriyaki place next door to it. Scott’s steps slowed as he watched Eddie inch towards the restaurant’s glass windows, overshadowed by a red awning.

“The Subway is probably safer… just a heads up,” the dark-haired man pointed out. His hand already rested on the door handle of the sandwich shop. 

“No, good point,” Eddie said, trying to tug himself off course by grabbing the pillar between the restaurants and pulling towards the Subway. Scott now stared at him as if he’d lost all reason. 

“Ah, Eddie?”

I NEED ORGANS EDDIE THEY DON’T SERVE ORGANS AT SUBWAY

“Uh, the heart wants what it wants, I guess,” Eddie said, gave up, and walked into what proclaimed itself to be ‘Happy Rice Teriyaki Emporium.’ It was a sit-down restaurant with terrible line of sight. Not only did Scott not want to come here, EDDIE didn’t want to come here. “This can’t go well~” he sing-songed very quietly to Venom, who just made happy noises about pork and gizzards and livers. 

“It might not be that bad,” Scott said, telling the hostess they wanted two takeaway meals and collecting the menus. “Nobody’ll bother us if we leave right away, that’s what Kurt’s told me. He’s on my security team and knows a lot about the area.”

BAD PEOPLE

“No, Scott’s a good guy, I’m sure his friends are good people.”

“Thanks?” Scott said with growing puzzlement. “They are?”

This wasn’t going to work. He wasn’t going to keep it together long enough to get a damn meal here (YES YOU WILL) and Scott was going to start asking moronic questions like ‘did you get rescued from a tree by a giant black blob of goo last week by the way? Cause he said he saw you.’ 

His journalist side remembered that much about Scott; the man could read a situation but usually caused the situation in the first place.

Eddie replaced the menu and turned around to leave. “Sorry, Scott, I’ve lost my appe—FISH BALLS, FOUR BOWLS OF POKE, AND WHATEVER YOU HAVE THAT’S STILL ALIVE.”

‘come on Venom, cooked food, please, stick to cooked food’

“AND A COOKED PIECE OF CHICKEN. JUST THROW IT ALL IN A BAG.”

The waitress looked deeply concerned about having to take an order from someone who sounded like a demon, but the quick movement of her pencil indicated that she had gotten everything. “Steamed or fried rice?”

“Ah… fried, please,” Eddie said in a much quieter tone. “Thanks. And boxes would be great, not a bag. Again, food in boxes please, not thrown all together in a bag. Thanks.”

“Eddie, what the hell?” Scott asked in a low voice as soon as the woman had headed off to the kitchen. “What was that? Are you okay?”

Eddie took a seat on the bench in the lobby, trying to stare at the large aquarium and thinking about the meditation music playing in the background. “My voice does that now.”

“We’re not close. I get that and I barely know you, but you can’t just go around talking like Satan at people.”

HAVE WE MET SATAN

“I don’t think we sound like the Judeo-Christian king of hell slash the underworld,” Eddie said, the description included for Venom’s benefit. “But yes, we’re not close and it’s not any of your business.”

Lang took a deep breath. “I guess I shouldn’t ask about Muir Woods then?” 

“No, you shouldn’t.” Eddie felt a trickle of relief, realizing that if all their food was raw, it was going to take less time to make than Scott’s order and he could be out of here faster.

“Mmn.” Lang looked hopefully in the direction of the kitchens – then Eddie saw his posture change. “Eddie, get under the bench.”

In another life, he would have done so without thinking. Still did, when Venom was telling him. Investigative journalists tended to die if they couldn’t follow orders. But with Venom, the self-preservation part of his brain tended to ask more questions like ‘but what’s going to happen?’ and ‘isn’t Venom just going to bang my head on the bench as he drags us out into the fight?’ and sometimes, very rarely, a thought like: ‘well, could I help?’

“Seriously, dude,” Scott said, taking a few steps back towards the door and fiddling with something on his watch. “Nobody in this place likes X-Con, especially not guys who got arrested because of us. You’re going to want to leave.”

HUNGER

“Leaving’s not really an option right now,” Eddie said, though he backed towards the door as much as he could. “As long as there’s a chance there’s going to be food.”

“Are you serious?” Scott sighed. “Just, bench? Please?”

“O…kay?”

“Great,” he said and vanished. Eddie took a step back, hearing Venom make hissing noises of displeasure in his head.

“Uh… Scott?” Eddie asked, almost whisper-shouting the name.

The gangsters Scott had been seeing walked around the corner and into the tiny lobby space, backing Eddie towards the aquarium. Putting Venom so close to food swimming around in a tank wasn’t a good idea, but these guys wouldn’t know that. They were Russian, probably armed, and looked like they could have been cousins to the Russian mob he met in New York, once upon a time. 

“Can we avoid biting anyone’s head off today?” he asked Venom in an undertone. The four gangsters had taken up positions, two preventing his exit from the front door, one to ‘intimidate’ and one to make sure he didn’t make it further into the restaurant.

“Where’s Scott Lang?” the intimidator demanded. 

“He vanished. Just to satisfy my own curiosity, do you guys say ‘bro’ all the time to each other? There’s just this Russian mob in New York and they—wow, okay, knives already.” The man had a very nice knife. Eddie opposed its presence that close to his spleen. “I’m an organ donor, guys, stab me and you kill a transplant patient somewhe—SHIT!”

That Ant-Man guy was here. He punched the intimidator into the guys at the door, then vanished again while they went down like pins in a bowling alley. Eddie moved towards the door again, only to find that the waitress had come out of nowhere and was shoving the bag of food at him. 

“Uh, thanks,” Eddie said, inching backwards and trying to keep a rogue hand from venturing into the bag of food. “I’m just looking for my—hey, Scott?” he called hopefully into the general restaurant area, trying to ignore Ant-Man’s flashy appearing and disappearing and—

DUCK

The bullets thudded into the door behind him and, as soon as they’d stopped shooting, one of Venom’s arms twisted the doorknob and yanked them out of the restaurant, leaving Eddie to run like hell for the nearest alley. 

HUNGER, the symbiote shouted as soon as Eddie had gotten out of the direct line of fire.

“We didn’t even DO anything, you can’t be this hungry!” Eddie shouted, still running down the alley with the bag of food hooked over his shoulder. 

YOU DIDN’T SLEEP

“So?!” Deciding he was far enough from the problem area, Eddie leaned heavily against the wall. Had Venom’s appendages not already started digging into the bag of food, he would have forgotten about it entirely.

SLEEPING REPLENISHES ENERGY STUPID

Suddenly all the bad nights followed by mornings with a cranky Venom made sense. “I thought you didn’t sleep.”

Venom said nothing in response and Eddie squinted towards the end of the alley to check for anyone following. No one was. It wasn’t safe to be in an alleyway either, of course, but it beat waiting for the Russian mob to catch up. Ohhh, and he’d recognized at least one of them from an expose he’d done in New York. Shit.

“We should really find Scott,” he mused, trying to get his mind off the memory.

WE DON’T NEED HELP

“You weren’t so quick to refuse help last night,” Eddie pointed out, moving down the alleyway so he could get a better look at the restaurant exterior. In the background of his mind, Venom started shouting about the food and wanting to eat SOMETHING and that if Eddie wasn’t careful, they’d eat something on the banned list. Eddie tuned some of the complaints out; it wasn’t safe to try and ignore Venom entirely. He could’ve used a drink.

“Oh good, you grabbed the food,” Scott Lang said from behind him. Eddie whirled, taking a step back. Venom attempted to take control, pissed about being snuck up on, and Eddie took a few MORE steps back until he was on the curb, rather than in the alley.

Scott held up his hands and made an apologetic grimace. “Sorry!”

“How’d you get out of there?” Eddie demanded, swallowing the other questions of how the hell Lang snuck up on him or how he’d known where Eddie was. 

“Ah… back door?”

LYING

“Mmmno, how?” Eddie said. It wasn’t just Venom’s saying he was lying; it was everything Eddie knew as a journalist saying that Scott wouldn’t abandon a companion and run out the back door.

Scott made a face. “How about you go first.”

“I go first… what?”

Scott sighed dramatically and held out a hand for the bag of food. Eddie handed it over (Venom shouting at him the whole time) and Scott took out his container before handing the still-heavy bag back to Eddie. The journalist followed Scott out of the alley and towards better parts of the city as Scott started explaining and Eddie began eating: “When the Life Foundation got broken into, one of my jobs was to analyze where all the trouble started. The fire obliterated most of it but I hacked into their cloud backups and there’s all sorts of data of you getting in, getting attacked, breaking out.”

“Yeah. Cause I’d been saying for years that Carlton Drake is pure evil and I got my proof from that excursion.”

“You also broke into a secure lab and were attacked by someone who vomited an alien being all over you. They had security tapes going all the way back to the… experiments.” Scott sounded ill at the thought; hell, Eddie remembered being ill at the sight amidst all the ‘oh shit oh shit I’m gonna die here’

“Yeah, so?” the journalist said instead. “It’s not even the worst thing that’s happened to me on the job.”

“Everyone else that happened to? Died. Except for Carlton Drake and I don’t know what happened to his creepy alien thing, but no one can find him, so I’m guessing it’s not great.”

“Yeah, so?”

“And around the time you got vomited on, you lost your fiancée, crashed a restaurant and ate raw lobsters, and looked violently ill for DAYS. And now you’re homeless and wandering the Tenderloin. I’ve been there, s’all good, but I had people who helped me and a family to get back to. After hearing you were in Muir Woods the other day… I wanted to check up on you.” 

“Who told you I was homeless?” Eddie said, trying to keep his tone low. “How the HELL would you know that?”

“Uh. I went to your apartment and—”

“How would you know where I live?!” Eddie could feel the anger bubbling under his skin. With a personal issue like this, Venom probably wouldn’t interfere, but there were never guarantees. “You know where my bike is too? What the HELL, Scott Lang!”

“Okay, I also work for Hank Pym,” Scott said, his hands raised in a placating manner. “He’s got… some monitoring tech, which something disabled last night, so I had to come down here myself. I was keeping an eye on you cause, uh, well, you’re not doing good and there’s been a trail of people with their heads bitten off. I don’t know what you have to do with it, but—” 

“Bullshit, ‘you don’t know,’” Eddie snapped back. “You just told me you were watching the hotel, you know exactly what I have to do with it.”

Scott frowned and looked at Eddie until the journalist became uncomfortable at the struggles passing over Lang’s face. People rarely looked at him like that; he was a journalist and nobody made faces like ‘I want to tell you everything’ to a journalist. Except if the news was bad and would probably get him killed, oh yeah, THEN they were chatty Cathy’s.

WHO IS CATHY

“A doll from the 60’s, shh,” Eddie said. “Sorry, Lang, you were gonna say something?”

“I’m Ant-Man,” Scott said finally. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t share it on social media. Or traditional media. Or tell anyone else.”

Eddie stared at him for a long moment. “I’m a member of the media. You didn’t make me sign an NDA. You didn’t even say off the record!”

“Eddie—”

“NEVER tell people that! Never tell people you’re working for Pym! Good LORD, Lang!”

“I can trust—”

“You can’t trust me! I have a people-eating symbiote using me as a husk and you want to talk about trust?!” As he was shouting at Scott, he felt something pat him roughly on the head and, flinching, he looked up at the hand-shaped column of black smoke. 

YOU’RE MORE THAN A HUSK

“That’s not comforting!” Eddie shouted at the smoke column. He then looked at Scott, who looked terrified, and then realized he had just told the man who he—who they were now. “You… also shouldn’t tell the media.”

“… are you that thing from the woods?” Scott said.

“Yeah, technically.” Eddie finished off the rest of his food and pitched the trash with uncanny accuracy to the bin 40 feet away. “I keep an eye on him so nobody else has to and that means your Pym guy and everyone else who thinks I need minding. I don’t need the Hulk treatment and don’t plan on turning myself in.”

Lang was thinking of the decapitation cases, no doubt, and Eddie couldn’t think of anything to tell him to make the situation better. He could only take responsibility for what he was in control of and some part of him had convinced himself that a world with Venom in it was better than a world without it. Besides, evict Venom and it might find Anne or another compatible host – and continue with that whole ‘plan to destroy the world.’

YOU LIKE THE COMPANY EDDIE

Better not to wait for Lang to make up his mind. Eddie headed in the direction of his bike five blocks away, taking long quick strides. The encounter only underscored what he’d suspected: San Francisco had too many superheroes and staying here was only going to increase the odds they would notice him. 

“We’re not exactly subtle,” he said to Venom. The symbiote didn’t reply. It wasn’t Venom’s fault anyway, it was Eddie’s in not making enough to live here. He should’ve taken the job with the network when they offered it, though he’d probably still be living on a precarious budget. If anything went wrong medically, he’d be screwed.

“Eddie!” Lang chased him down. “Look, a couple of my security guys still share an apartment, you could—”

“I’m not living with more than one person,” Eddie said flatly. “And they would have to be damn well understanding.”

The statement ruled out Scott, who would probably have his daughter over on the weekends or be off seeing his daughter. Eddie wasn’t sure what the rules on child custody or visitation looked like, or even what Lang’s current living situation was. Hell, half an hour ago he hadn’t recognized the man on sight.

“Then… try the La Quinta on 9th and Crestwell. It’s gonna be a bit of a drive, but it’s almost as cheap as the Riviera and they’ll let you receive mail there, if you commit to staying more than a week.”

Eddie knew the area, though he didn’t like the idea of planning to experience homelessness for more than a week. “I might just head out of town,” he said casually. “Thanks for the heads up.”

“Is the backpack all the stuff you have?” Scott asked, and the father in him was beginning to show, so the child in Eddie bared its teeth.

“It’s all I need, Lang.”

“Okay, okay! Just… yeah. Just worried. You’re important to people. Being badass doesn’t mean that they stop worrying.” 

“Thanks for the pep talk, Jordan Peterson, I’ll be sure to call.” They had reached his motorcycle, which was miraculously untagged and undamaged from its night on the streets. It hadn’t hurt its chances that he’d removed one of the tires, hid it somewhere else, then put a tarp over the bike. It could have ended badly, but it hadn’t. Scott hung around as he reattached the tire and, as Eddie got ready to leave, Scott shoved a business card into his hand.

“I dunno where you’re heading, but there are some people who find housing for individuals with powers. Nelson, the guy on there, works throughout California and Oregon.”

“That’s a lot of free time he’s got then.” Eddie shoved the card into his pocket all the same. 

“He’s between jobs, I guess.” Scott’s phone made the sound of a duck quacking and, the moment Scott fumbled to answer it, Eddie started the motorcycle’s engine.

“No, hold on, Eddie, Eddie!”

Too late, they were GONE.


	3. You drive all night, we haven’t slept in years

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There may not be a second update this week, but I'm still plodding along at this! The chapter title is from "Have to Drive" by Amanda Palmer.
> 
> Thank you all for reading. :) oh, and happy almost-Halloween!

WHO IS ANT-MAN

Eddie had some practice in deciphering Venom-speak. “Ant-Man’s a superhero, kinda. He shrinks and gets bigger, that kind of thing.”

Eddie had been riding the bike for close to seven hours now, only stopping for gas, and even though Venom didn’t ask for more information, Eddie felt like talking. So, he explained reasons he knew of why people had powers, how most of the major superhero teams were clustered in New York because who knew why. Then about how powers weren’t transferrable. Then a little about what he knew of the X-Men, which wasn’t a lot. Who knew if the symbiote was even listening, but it kept Eddie awake on the drive.

For a while.

WAKE UP

Eddie’s eyes opened to find that he was lying on concrete. He sat up slowly, spotting his bike, which had driven straight into the side of the mountainous road. His next glance was at himself, checking for the injures he should have had. He found instead that he was all right, but given the debris and torn clothing, he hadn’t been all right, very recently. He groaned with frustration rather than pain. All hint of daylight was gone from the sky and he glanced at the time on his phone, squinting in the bright light.

“Did I fall asleep?” he asked, already suspecting the answer. He’d never fallen asleep on the bike before and he’d done much worse nights than this in college. Which wasn’t so long ago, right? 

HUNGER

“Yeah, no, I bet.” The journalist shuffled to his feet, looking around for the nearest road sign. Crap, he couldn’t even see one in this dark. They certainly hadn’t designed the mountain pass for tourists to crash in. Moving slowly, he (and Venom) dragged the bike fully off the road so it wouldn’t cause any additional accidents.

BUT THEN THEY WOULD STOP

“Just hang on.” Eddie took one of the protein bars out of his backpack and began munching on it as he kept walking. The mountain pass was one he recognized from his few trips to Oregon. This trip constituted the second time he had been through here at night and he felt the same things as last time: solitude, fear that he wouldn’t get to his motel, and right now, stinging cold. Oregon had snowy winters, San Francisco really didn’t. 

He checked his signal and groaned, turning on the phone’s battery saver option and pocketing the device. Emergency calls were possible, but the ambulance would take longer than waiting for a ride or walking from up here. Plus, they’d want to get him a CAT scan and do a lot of investigative tests and, most importantly, ask him why he didn’t have the injuries they expected after sustaining a crash like that. 

THEN WE KILL THEM AND TAKE THEIR VEHICLE

“For the last time, we don’t kill paramedics!” Eddie shouted, comfortable that no one would hear them arguing up here. “They come out to help us and in return, we don’t eat them.”

He walked a little faster, seeing tail lights shining down the next hill – then stopped, looking back at the bike. 

YOU AREN’T GOING TO CRY ARE YOU

“I had that bike a lot longer than I’ve had you,” Eddie said fiercely, starting to walk onwards down the hill. “Got better mileage too.”

IT KILLED YOU

Eddie took another look at his clothing. It didn’t look… THAT bad… “What, seriously?”

HUNGER

Munching through the protein bars, Eddie headed down the mountainside, the complaints of Venom an almost-soothing background noise. The tail lights had long since vanished and the random speed limit signs he kept passing were the only sign that anyone drove this road. As another hour slipped by, he wondered if Mr. Nelson, houser-of-the-powered-folks, would drive up a mountain to come get him. 

AND YOU WANTED TO LIVE IN THE WOODS

“I would have gotten gear! A tent, camp stove, all that good shit, and I would’ve held the hell onto my bike.” It would’ve cost money, they both knew that, but he could’ve taken that chance. Right now, he wished he’d taken the chance before leaving, instead of hoping he could make it to Macdale, near Salem, Oregon, by that night. There was a cheap hotel in Macdale and it was quiet; he could’ve been sitting with some coffee and studying his options by now, far from supers and the people San Francisco had left behind lining the streets, reminding him of what he’d soon be. Not the super bit, the other bit, the homeless bit. 

“And before you say ANYTHING, they aren’t food!” he shouted. Venom hadn’t, in fact, said anything but he could pick up on the thoughts of his partner sometimes. “I was friends with the woman that—”

I KNOW THAT

Oh. Right. Venom had been in Maria’s body before Eddie’s. He still had trouble sleeping when he thought about the fact he hadn’t even tried to carry her out of the building. There hadn’t been time to check her pulse, she could’ve been ALIVE—

SHE WAS DEAD, the symbiote growled. AND YOU WEREN’T ALLOWED TO THINK

“I wasn’t the what now?” The current hill had finished its descent and began climbing again. Eddie began to wish he was in better shape for the hike. 

YOU WERE A GETAWAY VEHICLE NOT A DRIVER EDDIE

The journalist stopped walking, hearing the distant grumble of a car. Not some speed racer coming around the curves, smaller than that, just barely big enough to trundle up mountains like these on one tank of gas. He felt new thoughts beginning to trickle in, something he was coming to realize as the sudden and homicidal urges Venom had. In response, he ate the Snickers buried at the bottom of the backpack. The urges receded. 

BASTARD

“So, would that mean I’m a bastard, but we’re not a bastard? Or are we both a bastard?” Eddie asked, beginning to walk in the direction of the car noise. “Or is bastard status dependent on who’s inhabiting the body at the time—OW.” One of Venom’s black smoke constructs had hit him in the forehead, hard enough to draw blood. 

CONVINCING, Venom said smugly. MAYBE YOU WERE IN AN ACCIDENT

They could see the car now, a single-person commuter car without much weight to it, motoring along. Eddie had already been thinking of how to get it to stop, especially since if it was a woman, there was no way in hell she’d stop in an area with no cell signal at night. Ditto for a family. Honestly, the only people who would probably stop for him were truckers, so it was a complete surprise when the little car pulled to the side of the road and the doors unlocked. 

Moving carefully, he opened the door without getting in. No guns pointed at him, awesome, great start. The man at the wheel looked maybe twenty years older than Eddie, wore a wedding ring, and was wearing a Parrothead T-shirt and jeans, which probably wasn’t what you wore to go assault hitchhikers (hopefully?).

“Where you goin’?” the driver asked, motioning for Eddie to get in. The journalist hesitated. He didn’t feel any fear for himself, Venom could take this guy out in a heartbeat, but he feared for the man’s survival. 

“Macdale,” he said, half-hoping it would turn the man off.

“You’re in Medford, son, so you’re gonna have a long night. Headin’ to Roseburg myself, but if you can catch a bus from there, you might make it as far as Eugene before morning.”

Eddie gripped the door for a minute, deciding to decide, and got in the small car. The man introduced himself as Hank and pulled the car back onto the freeway, remarking on their good fortune in not having an early snow or freeze, the coffee quality in Macdale, and other things that were as easy to tune out as Venom’s complaints. Eddie kept one ear out for threats or a change in the narrative, but Hank just liked to talk. He still hadn’t given his name, but Hank had a long enough narrative about Jimmy Buffet albums that meant Eddie didn’t have to say a thing if he didn’t want to, and he didn’t.

But he couldn’t afford to sleep either.

#

By the time they got to Roseburg, Eddie couldn’t imagine travelling any further that night. Hank made him take a twenty-dollar bill and dropped him off in front of an all-night diner franchise, urging him to get something to eat. The Greyhound station stood only a block away, lit up bright in this dark city. Maybe he could buy a ticket online—oh, right, he’d have cell service again! Eddie moved closer to the diner to pirate their wifi. There was a text from Lang, trying to sound calm, about wishing him luck – and then another four from Dad!Lang asking if he was in Oregon yet, if he was at a hotel yet, if he was eating enough, and then just ‘sorry. You’re probably asleep.’

Good, make up your own narrative, Scott, Eddie thought, then checked the text from Anne. Some burble about his horoscope that day, she was always into that stuff. She didn’t know he’d left. She wasn’t going to know he’d left the state, which was a stranger, sadder thought than he had expected.

He barely had time to think about it before his body was moving into the warmly-lit lobby of the diner – no, check that: he wasn’t doing this.

“TABLE FOR one, please, thank you,” he told the host, unclenching his hands from where Venom had practically lunched over the host podium. “Sorry about that. Dinner at three a.m. is … really exciting, right?” 

The host, a kid who looked like he was still in high school, nodded placidly. They probably got worse than symbiotic pairs at unholy hours of the morning. Eddie sat near the window, which meant Venom did the terrifying this-is-not-our-reflection gambit. Eddie glanced at the menu, ordered for both of them (THAT’S NOT ENOUGH EDDIE), and began drinking his coffee. He had every intention of getting through five cups in his time here. When the waiter returned to freshen his cup, Venom took advantage of the proximity.

“WE MEANT WE NEEDEd nothing, sorry, notEEDED SIX MORE ORDERS OF TATER TOTS I’ll get sick, come on THAT’S SIX ORDERS OF TOTSSSSS”

The waiter wore a similar expression to the host at this point, nodding casually even as he glanced up at Eddie from his notepad. “Anything else?”

“No, thank you,” he said into the shelter of his hands, elbows braced on the table.

The waiter vanished into wherever waiters went in empty diners and Eddie closed his eyes. God he was tired. He’d bought the Greyhound ticket on his phone and the next bus to Macdale would be leaving at 6:55am. It was currently… he checked the phone and had to stare at it to get the numbers to line up right… 3:23am. No one would be calling, not at six, not at nine, not at five in the afternoon. Except maybe scammers or the landlord, pissed that Eddie had left so much stuff behind when he left. 

Shit, but he’d brought the laptop and he’d crashed the bike on it! Panicked, he dug into the backpack only to find the laptop screen intact, the whole second-hand casing intact… 

YOU SAID THE BACKPACK WAS IMPORTANT

“Wait, did you save the backpack and then fix me?”

BOTH, Venom replied, then, after a moment had slipped by: WE WERE ALREADY SECURING THE BACKPACK WHEN THE VEHICLE CRASHED

“Well… thanks, then, for making sure it was fine, but I’d rather lose the backpack than almost die. Again. We just can’t lose it. The backpack just proves I’m who I say I am.” But maybe he should start sewing that information into his clothes, the way things were going. Or, since clothes were often destroyed, just keeping it in a safe deposit box somewhere…

I CAN DO BOTH EDDIE

YOU HAVE TO START TRUSTING US

“Ten orders of tots, a bacon burger and a steak?” The waiter asked, though he almost didn’t need to: Eddie and the staff were the only people in the restaurant at the moment. The journalist nodded reluctantly and waited until the staffer had left before setting one of the plates of tots on the seat between him and the wall.

“Just try to keep them from seeing you,” he whispered as the symbiote hissed happily.

NO ONE CARES

“No one cared in California,” Eddie corrected, picking at the steak that he hadn’t particularly wanted. “Other states, say, Oregon, don’t see this kind of thing on a daily basis and they don’t have a powered population that’s “out,” really.”

WE WANT THE STEAK

Eddie retrieved the empty plate and moved the steak down to the seat, casting a quick glance at the host podium. He picked at one of the many plates of tots and, after pooling ketchup on the side, tried one. 

They weren’t bad, but with the sound of Venom snarfing a steak, it was less than appetizing. He disassembled the burger and ate its component parts separately. When the waiter returned to provide more coffee, he simply commented on Eddie’s being hungry and took some of the empty plates away. It took Venom fifteen minutes to devour the rest.

Eddie kept drinking coffee until he felt like he could reasonably identify as a member of the human race again, which was around 5:00am. He paid the bill and, yawning, stumbled outside to the Greyhound station. The fresh air woke him up a little more. He found an unoccupied bench with a bar in the middle of it and leaned back to wait for the bus.

DON’T GO TO SLEEP

“Yeah, I’ve lived in New York and San Francisco, think I know better than to sleep at a bus stop, Venom.”

WHERE ARE WE GOING

“Macdale. There’s a lot of cows in Oregon, you’re going to love it.”

WHAT ABOUT ANNE

Eddie groaned, causing a few of the other people waiting for the bus to shift away nervously. Bad enough he was talking to himself. He then forced a smile into his voice, because people who sounded good natured and not hysterical as if having a merry conversation with themselves were, slightly, less scary. Right? “What’s the matter, buddy? You don’t want to spend some quality time with Eddie?”

YOUR HEART RATE IS ELEVATED

“Oh, well I’m just so excited about moving states cause I couldn’t afford housing. And having crashed my bike in between said states.”

STOP BEING SARCASTIC, the symbiote hissed. Apparently, sarcasm had entered its vocabulary and had been etched into the ever-growing list of things Eddie wasn’t allowed to do.

“I’m an investigative journalist, sarcasm is 70% of what I do. The other 30% is research. And writing. Neither of which I can do while sitting alone at a bus stop, between homes.”

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

Was it just Eddie or was there a thread of excitement in that statement?

WE ARE PARTNERS WE CAN DO THINGS OTHERS CANNOT

“Okay, you’re actually making me want to go to sleep. Just, hang in there until the bus gets here, okay?”

EDDIE

Ugh, here they went. “Yes, dear?” 

WHY DON’T WE HAVE ENOUGH MONEY

“It’s…” holy shit, what did you tell your alien symbiote about your financial status? It felt like some warped version of telling both your child and your spouse at the same time. “It’s… okay. Oh. Well. I—well, I am a loser, as you’ve noted, and losers don’t make much money.”

Unsurprisingly, Venom didn’t buy it. 

SECRETS EDDIE

“Fine. You know Earth geography pretty well already, I’m guessing? Know where New York City is? Know where San Francisco is?”

Venom grunted his acknowledgement. 

“Well, I’m from New York City, where I had a good career, working for a big newspaper, telling people about what was happening in the world. But I reported the wrong thing, said someone was doing things he wasn’t doing, because he’d told me he was doing them. So, when the super there caught the real criminal, I got fired and, like a loser, I ran to the other side of the country where my money isn't worth as much.” 

ALONE

“Dunno what you’ve experienced but generally people do everything in life alone.” That was probably the leftovers of the breakup with Annie talking. 

WE BOND WITH HOSTS MAKE THEM BETTER

THAT IS LIFE

HUMANS ARE STUPID

“Murdering all of planet earth by taking it over with symbiotes doesn’t sound as ‘better’ as you might think.”

YOU WOULD RATHER DO EVERYTHING IN LIFE ALONE

“Oh look, the bus,” Eddie said, hardly caring how obvious it was that he was avoiding the question. There was one thing he was sure of and that was that the bus would mean uninterrupted sleep. Once boarding, he found that no one from the bus stop wanted to sit next to the guy who had been talking to himself for the past thirty minutes. Good. 

EDDIE

“Sleeping. Gotta sleep, bud.”

SLEEP THEN

“Thanks.” Eddie wrapped his arms around the backpack and, with some discomfort and disgust, leaned against the bus window. 

YOU ARE WELCOME


	4. I’ll pay you anything if you can make the damn thing work

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all,
> 
> "I never call"s new chapter should be up tomorrow (if I have any crossover in interests). I just... realized at 1am last night that tranquilizer guns did NOT work the way I thought and I'm gonna have to modify it for accuracy. But, in the meantime, Venom!
> 
> The chapter title of this one is from 'The Perfect Fit' by the Dresden Dolls. Ya'll are awesome for trucking along and appreciating this little fic, and I appreciate your feedback, kudos, bookmarks, and everything else!

The bus stopped and Eddie woke up bleary-eyed, in a town he’d only seen once before. He stumbled to his feet, made sure the sign said ‘Macdale’ and got off the bus, swallowing hard against the dryness of his throat. Had that really been three and a half hours? It felt like 15 minutes had slipped by. In so thinking, the journalist nearly fell on the final step off the bus, Venom grabbing the hand-bar to make sure he wasn’t roughly introduced to the pavement.

CLUMSY

Eddie checked his phone, ignoring the dozens of messages that came up from Scott (since it was now almost 9am and acceptable mass texting hours) and pulled up directions to the hotel. 2.4 miles. Shouldering the backpack, he started walking.

HUMANS NEED A LOT OF SLEEP TO BE FUNCTIONAL

“Super sorry about that,” Eddie said without inflection.

ARE YOU GOING SOMEWHERE ELSE TO SLEEP

Somehow, Venom had managed to make the question sound like a mortal sin. Eddie focused his attention on the phone. 

“Yeah, we’re gonna make sure we have a room, then we’re gonna check in later, so we’ll have it all night.”

He did so, thankful that the hotel lobby looked reasonably clean and the hotel staff were friendly (or at least looked up when he came in). The lobby did not, however, have a bunch of couches he could sleep on, so he walked back out after registering, wondering where he could hang out until he could conceivably check in at four in the afternoon. It had begun raining lightly and the grey concrete of the street was dotted with black circles. Against the whole grey-white sky and the dark evergreens like distant monsters, it didn’t do anything to boost his mood. 

YOU WANTED TREES

“Yeah, yeah, big funny para—symbiote when you’re not getting rained on.” Eddie checked his wallet. The hotel would have to be by cash and while he had enough for that, there wasn’t much for anything else like food or another hotel room. He checked the directions for the local branch of his bank and started walking again. Venom growled menacingly and, once his heart rate had calmed down, Eddie realized the symbiote was approximating his groan.

WALKING AGAIN

“We’ll go somewhere with tater tots, okay?”

CHOCOLATE

“Well, we’re not getting both.”

#

The ATM didn’t work. Of course not, that would be convenient, Eddie reflected. There had been a lot of motion inside the bank doors and the parking lot was crowded with cars. The journalist really didn’t like the idea of heading inside, but without any other way to get cash, he might as well. 

He wandered in reluctantly, remembering that he couldn’t buy tater tots for Venom with less than $20. In the way of all banks that seemed to penalize him for every financial transgression, the building was very nice. High, paneled ceilings, a water feature by same couches… tellers and patrons crouched in front of the bulletproof windows, while a couple of guys carrying heat followed a bank employee into the back. Eddie’s teeth gritted together. Too late to get out of the building to find help.

WE DON’T NEED HELP 

“Oh, course not, I just don’t like getting shot,” Eddie hissed, taking a few micro-steps back towards the door to avoid the team swarming the lobby.

“Hey, stop moving!” One of the fellows shouted, a faux-devil mask muffling his voice. Each of the robbers seemed to be wearing one – Devil, big cat thing, Bear, and Wolf. He didn’t know if there were any others; there probably were. Eddie took another step backwards, hoping he could capitalize on this muffled request.

“Sorry, did you say leave? Happy to, happy to—” 

Devil Mask shot the glass door just to Eddie’s left. The bullet buried itself in the glass, though the wave of fear that shot through the bank almost hid the noise of the impact. Eddie lowered his hands from where he’d raised them to cover his face. 

“Okay then.” 

BAD HUMANS

The statement had that inquisitive, thrilled intonation that Venom got when it seemed like they would be able to – Eddie’s mind flooded with all the things Venom thought they could do – when they wanted to but would NOT DO THAT – but they could scare the hell out of them and they could MAKE PILES OF FEET AND PILES OF NOSES – they could arrest them like human beings who were dispensing justice, -justice-, Venom, remember that thing we talked about?

JUST US

“Oh God—” 

The symbiote’s appendages shot out and flung Devil Mask into the glass door behind them, hard enough that the door DID break this time. If ever there was a perfect soundtrack for Venom, it was glass breaking as they strode into a fight. Venom was, officially, in the fight now. Unfortunately, Venom was a little like Batman (and a lot NOT like Batman) in that he rarely looked for victims. Eddie did. They were huddled off to the side of the room, hands on their heads, like every movie he’d ever seen. 

Especially every monster movie. No one was going to get in the way of this walking nightmare.

THAT’S NOT NICE EDDIE, Venom rumbled, in the process of banging two would-be robbers’ heads together until he spotted another one running for the door. The last thing Eddie saw before glancing back towards the hostages was the appendages shooting out after the man, looping around his ankles. There were kids in the hostage group. Kids who probably thought this was cool on TV but not so much when their parents were crying and all the adults were scared.

‘you’re scaring all the people. trauma is bad too V’

WHAT IS TRAUMA

‘shit’

If explaining his financial situation felt awkward, explaining what trauma was would be like explaining why sweatshops were bad to a fashionista. 

‘they’re not set up to see what you’re doing’

‘like kids V they’re like the kid in the woods’

THEY ARE ALL SCOTT LANG’S SPAWN

Eddie was about to shout in protest at the idea’s wrongness when he noticed that the symbiote had begun hissing in delight. 

WE KNOW THEY ARE NOT

Venom scanned the large room for any additional villains and, not finding any, strode over to the hostages.

“Service,” the symbiote said, speaking as clear as Eddie had ever heard their voice. One of the tellers got to her feet. She wore practical shoes, Eddie noticed, not like her coworkers in heels or heeled boots. 

“Thank you for choosing Drake Banks,” she said, putting an extra emphasis after the ‘thank you.’ “Our registers will not be accessible until the alarm is turned off and we reset some things. What was it you wanted to do?”

Eddie felt the symbiote scowl, not wanting to deal with the paperwork of human interaction, and had a sudden, lurching thought.

‘no no Venom don’t put me back in the fu—hi, ma’am, sorry, I needed to withdraw some cash,” Eddie said. Venom had retreated, leaving the journalist to deal with a horde of former-hostages and the now very engaged bank teller who had seen him go from alien to human in seconds.

“I think we might be able to help you out with that, Mr…?”

“Y’know what, I think I’m gonna stay nameless.” Eddie took another glance at the door and the limp bodies of the bank robbers. “Very, very nameless. But, but they should be alive! So, if the police aren’t already on their way—”

“They are.” The bank teller shoved at least two hundred dollars into his hands, gathered willingly by the people in the hostage group, as well as her own slacks pocket. “Go.”

“Uh.” Another desperate glance. He could hear sirens in the distance. “Sorry.”

“Go!” 

He went. 

The rest of his day was spent in a coffee joint, keeping his collar turned up and his head down as he looked for the best and closest cities where he’d never run into any of those people again. He liked the idea of the coast, even if it had to be in Oregon. Water, trees, cliffs, but housing in coastal areas had the same problem as housing in San Francisco. He sipped his way through the same number of coffees he had daily when he was in college, looking for apartment complex after complex after real estate agency. The idea of renting an actual house appealed to him, giving Venom at least the space he would give a large dog, but in the coastal areas of Oregon, that idea was WAY out of reach.

He asked Venom for input a couple of times, not expecting much from an alien with limited knowledge of the United States, but the symbiote was forthcoming about preferences. Top floors if they had high ceilings. Near other humans (they’d had a long talk about that qualification). Good locks on exterior doors (again, another talk). A yard where rabbits and deer and birds would visit and Venom would probably eat them at a staggered enough rate that they wouldn’t scare them off altogether. Eddie had broached the topic of a house versus an apartment and, after a long description of the difference, Venom had agreed that a home would be preferable. Probably impossible to find for a single-member household (as far as anyone knew), but preferable.

AND YOU NEED A JOB

“And I need a job,” Eddie murmured, pulling up a statewide journalist jobs posting site. “And we need to stay out of fights.”

WE NEED TO HELP PEOPLE

“We need to never have this happen again,” Eddie replied in a hushed tone. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he reminded himself that things couldn’t possibly go any more off the rails than having an alien symbiote set up shop in the back of his mind. 

He opened another tab with home rentals on a community posting board and scanned through both at once, taking the odd sip of coffee until it went cold. His head felt a little light after a while, but he kept at it until Venom finally complained. 

EDDIE

“Mm?”

WE NEVER ATE

“Sure we did, we had…” His mind went blank. They had eaten here, hadn’t they? Hadn’t they eaten directly after they got the money? There was coffee, they drank coffee – oh. He remembered looking at the display case now next to the counter. They hadn’t liked the look of anything in the display case here, partially cause all of it was expensive. That had been… six hours ago? 

“Sorry.” He folded up the laptop. “Sorry, thanks for not… freaking out.” I.e. having him rampage through the display case or eat someone else’s leftover food.

HUNGRY

“On it.” He fumbled in the backpack for one of the protein bars and couldn’t find any. Maybe they were gone. Shit. “Just a little longer. We should be able to check into the room, then we can eat some pizza.”

YOU PROMISED TOTS

“How about potstickers?” 

-TOTS-

“Taquitos.”

TOTS TOTS TOTS

“Fried mushrooms.”

EDDIE

“Fine, fine.” Tots were a pub food anyway. If he was in luck, he could go out and ‘network’ a bit while Venom ate whatever they needed to. Even after being reminded that he hadn’t eaten today, food wasn’t the first thing on Eddie’s mind. He checked into the hotel, hid his backpack under the bed after removing the wallet, and left through the window. If no one saw him walk in with a backpack and walk out without one, no one could know he’d left it in the room.

Finding a pub took a little longer, but hunger (mostly coming from his other) always made for a fantastic motivator. 

EAT FIRST, Venom said immediately as they sat down at the bar. 

“I’ve been doing this a while, I think I can—”

EAT FIRST OR WE WILL SPEND MOST OF THE NIGHT OVER THEIR TOILET

Eddie ordered reluctantly, not even trying for the first drink while Venom seethed in the back of his mind. After the waiter had taken their order to the back, he glanced around the pub for a new friend to make. Journos had to be good at making friends; you didn’t get through disputed territory by being American and didn’t get a great scoop on tech espionage by being a dick at the bar. He made the beginnings of eye contact with the fellow who had just sat down next to him, then realized: without a drink, he’d look like a teetotaler waiting for his food and probably a girlfriend. 

And talking to Venom was out without looking like he was crazy. 

“Cameron, right?” Eddie called to the bartender. “Whiskey, neat.”

His guts twisted in a distinctly unnatural way. He turned away from the bar quickly, pretending to be answering a text and saying the words in a hushed tone to himself.

“V, I’ll wait for the food, I need to talk to people. I need to look like I meant to come to a bar.”

WE DON’T NEED PEOPLE

“I need housing,” Eddie hissed. “So if you can stop playing footsie with my lower intestine, I’d like to damn well find some!”

“Everything all right there, buddy?” the man next to him said. Eddie forced a laugh, though there was really nothing to laugh at: the man’s breath was practically lethal at this proximity.

“Ah, little sisters, y’know? I’m out of the state one day and she’s already wondering how to change her own flat tire.”

“I hear ya.” The man said, taking a sip of the amber liquid in his pint. “You new around here, shorty?”

Eddie was too used to cracks about his height to rise to the challenge. “Moving up from California.”

They exchanged small talk until Eddie had figured out what “Dave” did for a living (manufacturing) and if he could help them. He couldn’t, so when he left, Eddie moved onto the next person, and the next, and the next. When ‘Melissa,’ a pretty Native girl who worked in realty left, having also left her number on the counter, Venom finally growl/groaned.

LET’S GO HOME 

WE CAN CHECK INTO THE HOTEL EDDIE

“Or I can get you more tots.”

NO

BORING AS TREES HERE, the symbiote muttered darkly. AND THAT WOMAN’S BEEN STARING AT US SINCE WE SAT DOWN

WE DON’T LIKE HER EDDIE

“What woman?” Eddie asked. Despite the whiskeys in him, he still knew better than to leer around the room like an idiot.

“Hi, Mr. Brock,” came a female voice from behind him. 

THAT ONE

He forced himself to turn around, only to find the woman was sitting down next to him. A cop? Who else would know his name?

“It’s not hard to find out your name when you sit here introducing yourself to people for three hours,” the woman said, raising a delicately manicured hand to signal for a scotch. “And then making yourself interesting by talking to yourself when they leave.” 

“Well, who sits in a bar for three hours listening to someone they don’t know?”

“More first dates than you think.” The woman took her drink gracefully from the bartender. “And then do some googling to find out how much of what you’re telling people is true. Surprisingly a lot, except for the arrest records.”

One more thing that was going to make getting housing a bitch. “Some people don’t appreciate a good story.”

“Most of your stories seemed to be more killing and screaming than what I’d call ‘good.’”

“Is there something you’d like from me?” Eddie gave up and asked. The woman took a sip of her drink.

“I’m coordinating with the highway patrol. I’m happy to tell you that the team down by the California-Oregon border found your motorcycle! They called the phone number on record with the DMV, but you don’t seem to be answering, so they sent me along.”

Eddie slid backwards on the seat a little, tense and ready to run. 

“My department then looked up your financial information, just to see if you were all right and making purchases. Judging by your presence at this bar, you are doing just fine. I’d love to know how you pulled that off but, in more pressing matters, since you never called in your bike as stolen OR called it in as being involved in an accident, you owe the Oregon government a check for the towing and disposal of that mess.”

“Shit,” Eddie said softly, not directed at the woman. “I don’t have a lot on me.”

“If that was your primary mode of transportation, I’d guess not. But the fine stands. About $1,500 for the towing, disposal, and staff time. You’re lucky it was entirely off the road or there would be a steeper fine for obstruction.”

$1,500. His mind swam. He couldn’t pay that. This woman had to suspect he couldn’t pay that. What kind of excuse could he possibly give to leave now that wouldn’t look suspicious as hell? If only Venom was a leprechaun, he imagined, give the woman some fairy gold and run for the hills.

WE ARE BETTER THAN THAT

He felt Venom stir, black tendrils beginning to lace around his fingers and he frantically shoved them inside his hoodie pocket, breathing in quick bursts.

“no, no, no…”

“Mr. Brock,” the woman said, not rudely. It commanded his attention all the same. “I understand if you need help accessing services here. It would’ve been great if you wouldn’t have abandoned the motorcycle, but we can talk about—”

“Officer Monday,” came another voice from behind him and Eddie groaned inwardly. Not only were the whiskeys starting to react with his stress and now someone above the rank of officer had shown up to chew him out. “You said you were following up on the Brock case!”

“Sir,” she replied, respectfully but without the snap to attention Eddie would’ve expected. “This is Brock.”

Eddie turned around. Turning around was unlikely to help, of course, but if he knew what the man looked like, he’d know who to run like hell from in the future. The officer looked like Eddie had wanted to look in high school: easily 6’2, built like a linebacker, blonde crewcut, and looked like he had never worn a hoodie a day in his life.

“You kidding?” The higher-ranking officer looked him up and down, which would have been flattering if the man had looked less disgusted. “The California reports all say this guy is huge. The San Francisco police say he took on an entire SWAT team.”

THAT’S US WE DID THAT

“I’m so glad one of us it happy with this situation,” Eddie said softly, but apparently not quiet enough to keep the officers from hearing. 

“Oh, we’re thrilled,” the higher-ranking officer said. “Officer Monday has already filled you in on where to send the check?”

“Sure,” Eddie said because what the hell was the point in finding where the check was supposed to go if you didn’t have the money to pay or a fixed address to bill it to? “Am I referencing a certain invoice number?”

“Your license plate’ll do just fine, Mr. Brock. Of course, you’ll need to come down to the station, fill out some paperwork.”

NOT GOING

“Why aren’t we?” Eddie asked out of the corner of his mouth, as carefully as possible. 

THAT’S NOT A GOOD SMILE ON HUMANS

“Neither is ours, dear.”

“Ed, let’s face it,” the higher-ranking officer said. Officer Monday sighed, the sound natural, as if she’d done it a thousand times before. “There are more than a few arrest warrants out for you. The SWAT team? Pissed. Life Foundation’s lawyers? Livid. And you know, right now, it looks like your big guy’s on vacation. That’s happened to the Hulk before,” he told Monday. “You don’t know hilarity until you’ve watched the glasses guy cursing himself out for a solid two minutes trying to go green.” 

“You don’t have a very high bar for humor, sir,” Monday commented.

“I’ll allow that, seeing as you brought in Brock. Who’s stupid enough to check into a hotel under their own name anyway?” 

The hotel, Eddie realized. Shit. He’d have to go back and grab the backpack, because who the hell abandoned their social security card and passport because some cops were on their tail – okay, well, technically a lot of stupid people, but he wasn’t stupid.

NOT LOSERS

“Apparently we are,” he told the officers. “Probably because we didn’t think any small-town cops were going to be looking at a guy who took out a SWAT team. Now,” he slapped a couple of twenties down on the counter to pay his tab, hearing Venom growl/groan that he’d spent that much on drinks and food. “We’ll be going.” Then, quieter: “No killing them okay? No killing anybody right now.”

WE DID WHAT YOU WANTED

“We did what you wanted and got food!”

DON’T WANT DEAD FOOD

It was too late to say something along the lines of ‘hey, no, V, let’s talk about safer and less permanent solutions to hunger, hey we could eat a DEER, wouldn’t that be fun’ – he barely held onto his body as it was, so he had to leave it at ‘don’t eat cops they’re good’

When he did let go, everything went black. His next waking point was on another long-distance bus. The backpack sat next to him, though the top was overflowing with candy bars. He looked like an eleven-year-old running away from home, minus the dirty hoodie and the ability to afford a bus ticket. Outside, the night was lit only by highway lights. Public transportation wouldn’t have brought him out here. 

“Where are we going?” he asked, quiet enough that even if the other passengers could hear him, they’d think he was talking to himself, consoling himself from a bad decision.

EAST

“What happened?” Eddie asked, keeping that tone of hushed ‘self-monologue’.

GOT BACKPACK

WENT SHOPPING 

“What happened with the COPS.”

SHOULD HAVE SAID COPS

WE GOT AWAY

“Did we do anything that’s going to catch up with us?”

WELL WE DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY

Eddie had to bite his tongue to keep from shouting his response: “We BRIBED them?”

WE GAVE THEM MONEY

WE’VE DONE IT BEFORE

“To get information! Not to thwart justice!” 

THEY WOULDN’T STOP

A thought occurred to Eddie and, despite how much he tried to ignore the thought, it begged for an answer. 

“We didn’t have more than $200 in cash…”

IS THAT A LOT

“No. So, when you say we don’t have ANY money…”

WE GAVE THEM OUR CARD

“fuck,” Eddie whispered. Outside, the scenery sped by and he watched it as Venom asked questions like ‘IS THAT BAD,’ ‘SHOULD WE HAVE KEPT THE MAGIC NUMBER,’ and, most importantly, ‘WHY DID YOU GO TO SLEEP EDDIE WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO’ 

Because it was, at the heart of it, his fault. Having three (or five?) whiskeys over the course of the evening while he tried to get someone to help him find housing, then getting in a heart-pumping conversation with the cops, in addition to being more than a little stressed out, meant he’d passed out as soon as he wasn’t in control. After that, his symbiote had been on its own, under orders not to kill, with only one proven and available option that wouldn’t kill anyone, per se…

“It’s not your fault,” Eddie said, maintaining the hushed voice. “I shouldn’t have gone to sleep.”

YOU SAID WE DIDN’T HAVE MUCH MONEY

HOW MUCH MONEY IS THE CARD

“All of it,” Eddie murmured. “S’okay. We’ll figure it out.” 

He should’ve never gotten the hotel room. They hadn’t even stayed the night – but if he had, he probably would have had the cops knocking on his door six hours ago or something, and then he would have to escape the room and he might have lost his backpack—no matter which way it went down, he wouldn’t be able to pull it off.

Unable to think of another way to thank the symbiote for handling the situation as best Venom could, he opened one of the candy bars and began eating it. Huh. If they’d given their card and all their money to the cops, then where had the candy—

“Are these stolen?”

NEEDED FOOD

Eddie shut up and ate the candy bar. As soon as they arrived wherever they were going, he’d need to find a cheap and safe way to keep the symbiote in live food so it didn’t go after humans. The thought of routinely eating live mice, rats or even rabbits made his human stomach drop with nausea, but it beat waking up… some of the ways and places he’d woken up already.

The idea of a home was out of reach though. He wasn’t sure if Venom knew that already or if he’d have to tell the symbiote, somehow, that their current state of affairs was turning into a long-term situation.

#

Where they ended up, as the sign happily exclaimed, was Elkgate. It sat at the base of a national forest and was too small and too far south of Portland to have any real industry. Plenty of deer and rabbits had skittered from the bus as it drove into the area, so of all the things Eddie had to do, finding live food for Venom would be the easy one. 

“We might not be able to go by Eddie Brock,” he said. “It was stupid to think we could.”

WE CAN BE VENOM

“The people who might be looking for Eddie Brock will DEFINITELY be looking for a guy named Venom.” And they would probably shoot him on site, in that scenario. The symbiote went quiet, which worked fine for the journalist as he headed for a coffeeshop’s bright lights. His phone charge was dangerously low and, after digging around in the backpack, he’d come up with three dollars for coffee. Time seemed to be in a murky twilight and, if he had to guess, it would be close to four in the morning. He couldn’t keep doing this. 

NO WE CAN’T

“What about Eddie Sym?” the journalist suggested as he pushed open the coffeeshop’s wooden door, keeping his voice low. He felt a strange ripple across his shoulders, which he was coming to recognize as Venom’s version of a shrug. The idea of anything moving around inside him still made him want to hyperventilate from time to time, but he pushed it away. There was nothing to do about it and he didn’t WANT to do anything about it. Without Anne, he’d be doing this alone and without anyone in his life, he wasn’t sure he’d be doing it at all. 

“Drip coffee please,” he ordered at the counter, already eyeing the tables by the windows, where chargers would typically be located. 

“Name for the order?” the coffee girl asked. She was far more friendly than the hour of the morning would suggest, but then again it was her job. 

“Eddie Sym.”

Within seconds, a steaming cup of coffee was in his hands. “Thank you.”

He plugged in his phone and pulled the backpack to his chest, debating with himself what to do next. No where to go, no money, he hadn’t changed his clothes in two days, showered in three. Okay, well, two of those things he could take care of. 

And he could call Nelson. 

He inspected the phone’s 3% charge. If it cut out during a call, that was fate, right? Meant they didn’t need help from any hotshot lawyer do-gooder. He dug deep into his backpack, searching for the card Scott had given him yesterday. When he did find it, the corner containing the last digit had been torn off. There was no listing online. 

Come on Brock, just start trying. You couldn’t hate phones when half your job was to be good at phones. 

Yeah, but most of the people he called were people he needed information from, not ever people he was asking for help. They had nothing to do with him, no reason to help him; the only time he’d accepted help the last few months was from Annie and Dan and THEY had basically manhandled him into it. 

He dialed the first version with a one at the end of the number. No answer.

With a two. Disconnected.

With a three. Sex hotline. Wow, the agency must have had a lot of interesting wrong numbers or vice versa.

With a four. It rang and rang and rang.

With a five or a seven. Angry people who demanded to know what the hell he was doing calling at this hour of the morning. 

With an eight. It seemed like it would ring through, then a faint ‘Marcy, that’s the housing phone, no, I do need to take it…” The phone got louder, directly into the phone. “Hello, this is Foggy.”

“Yeah, Scott Lang gave me your number,” Eddie said, almost waiting for the phone to cut out already. He’d clearly woken up the man, and his partner. “My name’s Eddie.” 

“Brock?” Foggy asked, sounding like he was shuffling through papers now, a little distracted.

“Sym,” Eddie corrected. “I’m going by Sym now.”

“Eddie… Sym.” 

“Yeah.”

“You can pick up your prize for subtlety at our main office in New York next week,” Foggy said with amusement. “Can I ask what city you’re in?”

“Off the record?”

“Everything we say on this call and in future calls will be off the record, unless you say you want it otherwise,” Foggy said with the air of someone reciting a well-known adage. “Seriously, I’ve kept a lot of secrets for people.” 

“I’m in Oregon. South of Portland.” 

“Uh huh… Macdale?”

“East of there, now.” 

“Alright, are you married to the idea of staying where you’re at?” Keys clacked on the other end of the phone, as if Foggy were looking up the geography.

“Not in the slightest, but I can’t go back to Macdale,” Eddie said. 

“Hence the name change?”

“Hence.”

“What kind of housing do you need?”

Eddie rubbed his forehead. “Ah, what do you got?”

“Whatever you need. I know you were living in San Francisco or thereabouts. I can get you something for a lot less, house or apartment, somewhere outside of Macdale. A lot of people do stumble in there, so the cops are… excitable.”

“I have to find a job first, so I’m just looking for something temporary.”

“Do you want to stay in Oregon, Mr. Sym?”

The phone chose that moment to die. Eddie stared at the device in a horror he hadn’t expected to feel when he made the call. He hadn’t expected for that to… to result in anything, and now Nelson thought he’d hung up on him! He tried to turn the phone on again, and now noticed that the notification was not in the ‘charging’ mode. 

“Hey,” he called to the coffee girl. “Do any of these chargers work?”

“It’s not working?” she said, puzzled, and gestured for him to come over to the counter. “Here, sometimes the wall ones are finicky. I’ll plug it in back here.” 

He waited anxiously as she did so, annoyed that the device was going to be out of his reach but grateful that he would be able to charge it. The girl peered at it as she plugged it in, frowning. 

“It should have a charge indicator, right? There might be a problem with your charge cord.”

Shit. A new one would be seven to nine dollars, which was at least seven dollars more than he had right now. 

“Do you have another cord for that model? Just in the back somewhere?”

“People do abandon them quite a bit.” She shuffled through a box below the counter, located one, and finally, his phone was charging. He sat at the counter after that, watching the silent phone fill up with missed calls and texts from Nelson’s number. He hoped the lawyer wouldn’t lose interest, or think he’d lost interest. 

It was his only option right now.

After another ten minutes, he leaned over the counter to check the charge indicator. It moved at a snail’s pace. The coffee girl strode out from the back at that moment, spotting him reaching, almost overbalancing, over the counter.

She snorted and moved the charger from the back wall to a closer outlet, where Eddie could easily use the phone. She set the device in front of him and smirked. “You could’ve just asked.”

“Thank you,” Eddie said. Venom growl/laughed. 

WE’RE TAKING THAT CHARGER ANYWAY

“Just because we don’t have one doesn’t mean we take them,” he muttered to the symbiote as he pulled up Nelson’s number. 

YES IT DOES

“Hi, Mr. Nelson? I think we got cut off.”

“Oh good! I mean, I wouldn’t IMAGINE that you’d hang up on someone who’s finding you housing, but you’d be surprised.” The lawyer muttered something that Eddie would swear to God was ‘wish someone would pay my rent’ but railroaded onward too quickly to comment on it. Within a minute, they had an appointment with a landlord set up for the following week and a packet of vouchers that should be transmitted to a local motel that night, allowing them to stay until the housing appointment. Nelson would even be travelling up for it.

Eddie found himself stammering for words. “T… thank you. This means a lot to us.”

“Just be there for the appointment, okay?” Nelson replied. “This guy’s been threatening to quit working with us for a while and I want to be sure you get in.”

“I’ll be there. I’ll definitely be there.”

‘’Just saying, Lang missed his. Four times.”

“I pride myself on not being Lang,” Eddie said, internally apologizing to the ‘dad friend’ he’d somehow acquired. Lang had been, after all, the person to refer him to Nelson in the first place.

His gaze was flitting around the room, trying to avoid his thoughts of ‘betraying’ Lang – and a cop walked into the coffeeshop. 

“Gotta go.”

“Don’t forget to check in at the hotel!” Nelson shouted, as Eddie moved to hang up the phone. 

YOUR HEART RATE—

“Thanks, V, I’ll let you know if I’m interested,” the journalist said, pocketing the phone and its charger before making his way towards the door. The cop was now ‘cops,’ a young Latina woman investigating the menu with two similarly-aged white male cops in tow. Eddie inched past all of them, smiling, nodding, ignoring Venom’s comments as they increased in volume, suggesting what Eddie could do to make sure cops didn’t bother them again.

Once they finally made it outside, Eddie could feel rain pattering on his arms. The sensation just reminded him that he needed a shower. Before he could wander off to look for the local Y or other agency, he heard the bell behind him chime. The female cop leaned out.

“You pick up a charger by accident, guy?” she asked.

Eddie ran. Again.


	5. if wellness is this, what in hell’s name is sickness?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To avoid whining or making excuses, I will simply say that I wish I had finished this chapter two weeks ago and THANK YOU for waiting.  
> -and the chapter title is from 'Runs in the Family' by Amanda Palmer.  
> -and that I appreciate you.  
> That's all. Have a lovely weekend, er, rest of week, cause I know what day it is!
> 
> Edit 12.13: Working on the next chapter, I swear. I would have, also, sworn that I updated this like, three weeks ago, but instead it's been almost two months. Aghhhh. Sorry, and thank you for your patience.

Venom had tolerated worse hosts than Brock but his newest host’s tendency to throw his hands in the air or run away from any and all threats boggled the mind. He had even DROPPED the CHARGER for their communication device. The symbiote thought about grabbing it, but decided that maybe dropping it was part of their ‘escape plan.’ 

So, they got out of sight of the policewoman (who hadn’t even chased them) and Venom was left with the problem of his host’s panicking mind. They were hungry, easily solved if not for Eddie’s morality and being ‘broke,’ which was a word Venom disagreed strongly with until realizing it meant ‘without currency.’ Then his host continued thinking about being useless and worthless and—

Well, this was degrading quickly.

EDDIE

“I’m good, we’re good.” Eddie slowed down to a pace that could be mistaken for that of a devoted jogger, rather than someone being chased by zombies. 

PEOPLE GET SUSPICIOUS IF YOU KEEP RUNNING AWAY

“Yeah, agreed, agreed.” Eddie looked somewhat wistfully in the direction of a convenience store they were jogging past. “We just can’t keep burning through towns like this.”

YOU THINK RUNNING FROM OTHER HUMANS WILL IMPROVE OUR CHANCES

“No, I just…” Instead of continuing the statement, his host jogged a little faster.

DO YOU EVEN WANT TO STAY HERE

Venom had noticed that Eddie had never answered the question of whether or not he wanted to stay in Oregon when the lawyer asked. Eddie also hadn’t discussed it with Venom. Venom liked the idea of staying here and eating bad guys, sure, but if any other host had tried to drag them all over the planet without seriously talking to Venom about it, they’d be dead or Venom would be searching for a new host. 

Venom growled when Eddie didn’t respond. UGH LOSER YOU DON’T

“I—it’s USEFUL to stay!” Eddie protested. Unrewardingly, nothing more than that could be gleaned from his mind because he really did believe it was more useful to stay than to do anything else. There was a strong desire to return to ‘how it was,’ but Eddie seemed to have been feeling like that since Annie had broken it off with him. Nostalgia didn’t predict future actions.

IS IT REALLY THIS HARD

“Yes!” The idea of New York flitted through Eddie’s mind. He didn’t feel the same way about it as he did about San Francisco, though there were some similarities. Hm. 

YOU WANT TO GO BACK THERE

Eddie’s jogging had taken them out of the town proper and into the more wooded countryside (which was everywhere, here). This meant they could speak more freely, even if it hadn’t been stopping them much before.

“Yeah. But I got run out of there, like I said, and it’s not going to be easy going back.”

YOU WOULD LIVE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE IN THE WOODS TO AVOID CONFRONTATION

“That’s not what I said—”

COWARD

WHAT COULD THEY POSSIBLY DO TO US THAT WE HAVEN’T EXPERIENCED

“No one will hire me—us, so we’ll have no housing, we’ll get a reputation for killing people and what that really means is that I’LL have a reputation for killing people and one day they’ll just bring out some super to end us, because NYC has thirty-six billion superheroes.”

THAT IS MORE THAN THE POPULATION OF THE PLANET

“Maybe some are parasites then.”

Venom had never been one for impulse control. His host slammed into the tree hard enough that Eddie coughed and muttered ‘holy shit’ rather than leaping to his feet again. 

WE ARE NOT A PARASITE

“Yeah, yeah…”

NEW YORK IS CLOSE TO HUMANS

BAD MEN

IT’S A GOOD IDEA TO GO BACK THERE EVEN IF YOU ARE A LOSER

“You really think I’m travelling across the country so you can eat people’s heads?” Now Eddie pushed himself to his feet, somewhat unsteadily. “We’re staying here. I’ll get a job. We’ll try to be a… the news called us something… a lethal protector. Hell, this place probably needs a hero more than New York needs another one.”

Eddie didn’t seem happy with the idea, but resignation appeared to be all Venom could raise at the moment. Resignation and the admission that they might get to eat people here at some point.

WE WILL BE ITS BATMAN

“How did you hear about Batman?” Eddie began their long walk back towards the town.

YOU THOUGHT OF IT WHEN WE WERE IN THE BANK

“Okay, uh… I’m pretty sure we’ll be Venom,” Eddie said. He seemed uncomfortable at the thought of running around using their own name for things but Venom felt no such objection. “Sorry for calling yo… well, your species, parasitic.”

MAKE UP FOR IT WITH FOOD

“And what are we getting?” 

Venom grunted noncommittally. Eddie’s mind drifted, as it usually did when Venom sounded ambivalent, to the swarm of problems that did nothing to prepare him to prioritize, find or consume food. What the hell was his host, Riot had believed they were entirely motivated by food and power, and the power bit was mainly to obtain better food than their peers. 

Enough about food (while they were walking). 

Eddie would have to find a job. That’s what his host kept chanting in the back of his mind. There didn’t seem to be much out this way but everyone needed journalists at some point.

#

Realistically, they didn’t. At least, not any MORE journalists. The reporters and researchers that local papers employed had been hired in the 2002 to 2005 range, meaning they had clung to their jobs through the great recession and weren’t going to lose them to some Californian upstart who tended to talk to himself. 

Eddie wanted to call Nelson almost every night and thank him for the hotel. He managed not to bother the lawyer for that, focusing on increasing their grand income of $0.00 to something they could at least go to the laundry with. As it was, he made the free breakfast the hotel offered last all day and kept a tight rein on Venom’s extracurricular eating of squirrels and small birds. 

As the days slipped by, he began to feel like he had when he’d first got Venom – exhausted, cranky, and willing to climb into a tank of live lobsters to feel less exposed. 

Despite this, he managed to get a callback for one job. Not journalism, not even copywriting.

WHO WOULD HIRE YOU TO DEFEND THINGS, Venom demanded the moment Eddie got off the phone with the recruiter for the security company. 

“People who see that I’ve done it before,” Eddie said. He knew the ins and outs of a security job, had to get through college somehow if his father wasn’t helping, but he didn’t want to patrol a lumber yard from 8pm to 6am for a company that was headquartered in Illinois and didn’t provide benefits. He waited an hour or two before calling the recruiter back, just to make sure no one else called to offer him a benefit-inclusive, full-time journalism job where he would practically be his own boss. No one did. And waiting this long to accept an interview constituted a risky move in the minimum wage job hunt, so he agreed to the ridiculously early interview time for the next morning. 

He aced the practical interview. He could edit a word document and made the interviewer wet himself a little during the ‘commanding shout’ part of the interview. Both of these made him more qualified for the job than 92% of the other interviewees. The other 8% were ex-military and ex-convicts and Eddie tried to explain to Venom why it would not be a good idea to piss them off. The symbiote was in no mood to listen.

WILL WE GET TO KILL BAD PEOPLE, Venom asked, true excitement in the low voice for the first time in a week. Eddie had left the interview room quickly after he finished the session, rather than lingering to talk with the other candidates, and now hurried through the nearest park, pretending to be on his cell phone. Winter had settled in hard in Oregon and when he had walked here at five in the morning, there hadn’t been enough light to see by. Walking back at eight wasn’t much better.

“No!” Eddie forced his shout down to a whisper. “There are no jobs where we’re allowed to kill people. No jobs that we’re taking, anyway. If we kill somebody, Nelson won’t talk to us and we’ll have to leave the hotel and run away again. And we won’t have money for a trip to New York.” He caught himself. “Or California. Or groceries.”

WE DON’T HAVE GROCERIES EDDIE AND WE’RE SICK OF DEAD HOTEL FOOD

“I know.” The energy wasn’t there to snap out the words. “But if we get this job, we’ll get a paycheck, then we can set up the new bank account for Eddie Sym and we’ll have a feast. Without breakfast food.” He almost tripped over a low carousel in the dark and veered around it. After that, he pulled out his phone and checked the direction on his phone again to make sure he was heading towards the hotel. 

Work used to be like this, when he was doing a particularly messy story. Stumbling home through a still-foggy park, especially if Anne wasn’t answering her phone to pick him up or his bike was in the shop. 

The symbiote considered Eddie’s proposal of a ‘feast’ only a minute before growling: TWO DAYS

“Two days… or what?” 

OR WE FIND FOOD

“No eating people!” Eddie said.

WE WILL EAT WHAT WE NEED

“And we don’t need to eat people because we’ll get in trouble.”

WE WILL EAT WHAT WE NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED

“God, you’re impossible,” Eddie muttered and pulled the phone away from his ear as it actually started ringing. He answered and, after a very short conversation, hung up. He had the job. 

#

The security company scheduled him for his first shift the next day, which also happened to be the day before the housing interview. He would be up all night, which didn’t worry him, but Nelson was a little concerned to find out what he was doing. 

‘We might be able to reschedule,’ Nelson said, his concern a background to the sound of traffic whizzing by in the background. The lawyer would also be driving all night, though that appeared normal for him. Eddie, on the other hand, had already walked the two miles to the new job and was using a borrowed charger at a coffeeshop, several blocks from the site.

“No, it’ll be fine,” Eddie said. In the back of his mind, Venom chuffed in irritation.

NOT FINE YOU DON’T WANT TO STAY

“We’re very excited to have a stable home here,” Eddie said, attempting not to cringe at his own words. 

‘That’s great,’ Nelson said. ‘I’ll be there in another eleven hours.’

They said their goodbyes and Eddie hung up, glaring at his trembling right hand. “V, that’s not funny.”

NEITHER IS PRETENDING WE WANT TO STAY HERE

YOU WANTED ALL THESE TREES EDDIE TREES TREES TREES

As if it wasn’t enough that the symbiote had tried to do a chestburster impression through his uniform (they never should have watched Alien together, but Eddie had thought it would be funny. It was. For Venom.)

He headed for the job site, Venom still muttering about ‘trees’ all the time. The symbiote went silent when it saw all the felled trees of the lumber yard and Eddie felt the hair on his arms prickle, just a for a moment, after which Venom snorted and said something derisive about trees. 

As expected, the security work was hideously boring. Then there was the indignity of finding out that no, the legally-required bathroom did not exist, at least not closer than a fifteen-minute walk away. That explained why his coworkers kept wandering off into the woods. 

…the secluded, abandoned woods from which they stayed longer and longer and went to more and more as time went on. It meant he ‘guarded’ most of the lumber yard himself, which was easier when you had a morally-dubious symbiote guarding with you.

WE ARE NOT MORALLY-DUBIOUS, Venom said, sounding bitter about it. WE HAVE FIRM RULES

Cute, coming from a creature that had spent the better part of an hour trying to convince Eddie that he shouldn’t have even taken this job and, failing that, that he should have brought food (which was correct, he should have; they just didn’t have the food to bring) and since they didn’t have food, ANYTHING could be food. Particularly humans. The complaints did an admirable job of keeping Eddie awake, so he hadn’t complained back much. He didn’t even have time to worry about the housing interview tomorrow, whether or not he wanted to stay here, or if his interactions with the Macdale cops were going to stop him from getting housing altogether. 

He should pay off that fine, before someone got seriously angry.

“What was wrong before, with the trees?” Eddie asked, once all of his coworkers were in other areas of the site. 

NOTHING

“Yeah. Sure.”

YOU WANTED TREES YOU GOT TREES

“We need paper,” Eddie pointed out. “You knew paper was trees.”

OF COURSE WE KNEW IT WAS WOOD

Wood. But not trees. “Okay.”

WHAT IS LEFT BEHIND OF THE TREES LOOKS LIKE OUR WORLD

A LONG TIME AGO

“Oh.” Eddie didn’t know how to read that tone. “Do you miss it?” 

NO

That he could read. He’d experienced the same feelings about running away from his father’s house several times. “Gotcha.”

Six hours slipped by, mostly standing around or walking around. Two of his youngest coworkers decided he was ‘lobster tank guy!’ and a third had realized he was Eddie Brock, so Eddie had had to explain that he was Eddie SYM, he wasn’t working on a story and didn’t even know what a ‘viral video’ was. They didn’t believe him. 

It wasn’t the worst day he’d had but it wasn’t something to put on his LinkedIn profile either.

#

WE ARE NOT DOING THAT AGAIN, Venom said, as soon as they had gotten off work, taken the bus back to the hotel, and fallen in the door around 5 a.m.

“I don’t have an alternative, so yes, we are.” Eddie flopped back onto the bedsheets and tried his best not to think of what Anne would say about plopping facedown into a hotel pillow. After living in the trashy apartment and sleeping in some of the rougher places he’d slept, he couldn’t afford to be picky about bedding as long as it was in a proper hotel. Anne preferred their own bed. 

Besides, he felt too dizzy with hunger to remain standing. The hotel breakfast wouldn’t open until 9am. 

IT’S YOUR OWN FAULT LOSER

“Ah, yes, critiques from the alien who gave away my debit card,” Eddie replied, not moving.

Venom went silent, probably grumpy, and the journalist meant to apologize. It wasn’t Venom’s fault. Already struggling to stay awake, the act of clearing his throat to speak took too much effort. He yawned. The host drifted off before he could say anything, apology included. 

Finally, Venom thought, pulling them off the bed. They could not keep eating ICE CHIPS like fish and hoping for the best. It also relieved the symbiote of asking several questions about their host’s new job, ones that had nothing to do with trees. 

For starters, the employer didn’t provide food? Riot had been challenging, even tyrannical, but they made sure the team had available foodstuffs (mostly non-host humans) and somewhere to sleep where they would be safe from attack. Then again, Klyntar didn’t have a monetary system and ‘payment’ was ‘awarded’ via an increase in military rank, so Venom just had to understand human needs by osmosis.

And though he understood their needs, Venom couldn’t assist his host in finding food or housing or transportation in a way that aligned with Eddie’s environment. Which led to the next question: did the job provide money for ALL of that? Was it a lot of money? Background stress about that rattled around in the back of Eddie’s mind, even while he slept. It was impossible to determine if his anxiety was about the amount of money, when they’d get the money, or how long the money would come (or all three).

Eddie also experienced disproportionate fear about going to prison. The panic even seeped through to Venom: feelings of fearful anticipation, resignation, and yet more fear. His host felt like prey. The symbiote didn’t know what to do with that information, other than get money or get food. 

One of those things was doable.

It took less than a minute to find the local equivalent of Mrs. Chen’s. This one was owned and operated by a man of a nationality Venom wasn’t familiar with, given that he and Eddie had only had one conversation about nationality to date. In any case, the man of unfamiliar nationality did not try to stop them from stealing chocolate, milk, protein bars, and several hot dogs from their slowly-rotating metal pan. He had picked up the phone the moment Venom walked in the door and had stayed on the phone. The owner did clear his throat as Venom approached the door with the items piled into an (also stolen) backpack. 

“You could’ve brought your own BAG,” the owner said, so quietly as to almost be missed. Venom growled and pushed the door open instead of answering. In their peripheral vision, the owner hung up the phone and ducked under the counter, which seemed unusual, so they took notice of the distant sirens wailing through the street. Flashing blue and red lights came barreling around both of the street corners as a flock of police cars approached. The symbiote grinned.

The police took cover behind their cars as Venom walked out of the convenience store, being sure to stretch themselves to a Riot-esque size. What could ordinary humans do to them any—

The loudspeakers on top of several of the cars crackled. A familiar, high-pitched tone whined over the parking lot and open street. Venom’s grin twitched, minutely reflecting the splitting pain that shrieked through the back of the symbiote’s skull. Eddie woke up in the back of their mind, confused. Getting angry.

‘are those COPS where are we’ –then it was just a stream of baffled swearing as Eddie took in their surroundings.

“We’re handling it,” Venom replied, picking up speed as they ran towards the police cars and the hideous sound.

‘am I still in uniform? V, what the hell—’

“Busy, Eddie!” The symbiote rammed one of the police cars emitting the sound at full strength, though Venom kept close track of the policewoman behind it and grabbed her shirt, flinging her backwards at another of the cops. They crashed into each other, unhurt and unable to pursue. But the noise hadn’t stopped. Venom smashed in the window and dragged the policeman out through it, just before screaming in his face. 

The man trembled. The sound didn’t decrease in volume. 

Eddie shouted something about it being an ‘app,’ they couldn’t scream down an ‘app.’ Venom remembered this being said, vaguely, in the context of a phone. It was too late to find whoever had the phone that controlled the sound. And how had they known in an instant that the assailant was Venom and could be brought down by 600hz?

‘we’re infamous’ Eddie said, sounding exasperated. ‘we’re lucky they didn’t bring flamethrowers’

Venom dropped the terrified policeman without biting his head off. “Eddie, we’re going to—”

‘you’re not leaving me here in my new uniform to face a horde of cops’ Eddie snarled. ‘in case that was your plan’

Venom grunted, pain from the sound ramping it up to a keen. He needed to make Eddie understand what this was doing to them, that it didn’t get BETTER with increased exposure. His host sighed heavily.

‘fine put me back in’ Eddie said. ‘but you’re STAYING’

Venom dumped his host back into their body and hid somewhere the sound would be partially blocked by other sounds which, in most cases, was Eddie’s heart. Humans were so strange, relying on one heart to service blood to the entire body and their skin trapping everything in a restricting layer that only moved when it broke and then they were ‘damaged.’ His host’s heart beat fast enough that it seemed about to break through his skin.

Eddie gritted his teeth and spoke through the disorientation of the noise that was splitting them apart. “Okay, okay, turn off the noise, okay?” He raised his voice. “Sound off or no talking!” 

The sound abated. 

“Great, thank you. Honestly, this is kind of overkill for a simple shoplifting scenario.”

A voice came over the loudspeaker: “This is exactly the level of response we needed. Hands in the air, Brock.”

Eddie did so and Venom felt his host grow nervous as they surreptitiously checked out the available exits, most of which were already blocked with police personnel. “There’s an exit in the back of the store,” Eddie whispered, shifting his weight to the ball of his left foot without drawing the police’s attention to it. “I’m dropping the backpack and—”

WE NEED THE BACKPACK EDDIE

Several strands of black wrapped around the backpack’s straps. They were stronger now without the noise and didn’t have the luxury of arguing. Eddie simply pivoted and ran. The little shop passed in a blur as they kicked open the back door and ran out into the alleyway behind the building. No cops clustered here, probably all around the front of the building, and they pulled themselves up onto the rooftop. Eddie cursed quietly to himself the whole time, though never mentioning specifics. 

It took another hour of rooftop running and slinging from one building to another for them to ensure they had lost their tail and could officially go back to the hotel. The lawyer had been careful to ensure their check-in name was under ‘Eddie Sym,’ so they would have more time on their hands if they got into ‘adventures’ like this. 

They forced open the door on the rooftop and descended the stairs to their tiny hotel room, where Venom opened the backpack and dumped out the food on the industrial carpet. Eddie didn’t move from where he had sat down on the bed, wide awake but still sluggish in critical thinking.

“How did you get us out of here?” Eddie finally asked the symbiote, to which Venom shrugged. The same way they did anything; if Venom was motivated enough, Eddie came. Particularly if their life was being threatened but worse than that, their appetite had been threatened. 

YOU SAID WE WOULD GET FOOD AND THEN WE DIDN’T

SO WE GOT FOOD

“We can’t walk around town like that,” Eddie continued. “People know who you are.”

FOR NOW

“Don’t be dramatic,” the host practically snarled. “We’re not killing everyone who sees you, this isn’t some slenderman shit AND it isn’t a busy city where weird stuff can be chalked up to the population.” 

WE DON’T KNOW WHAT A SLENDERMAN IS EDDIE

IS IT SOMETHING TO DO WITH TREES

That was the only image that had flickered through Eddie’s mind at the statement. The host’s tone softened. “Please understand this. They knew how to get at you because your weaknesses are known, and now they know we’re here.”

In the process of unpacking the backpack, Venom discovered something they had taken from the cop and deposited it next to his host, before going back to unpacking the backpack’s contents. 

“What is that,” Eddie asked, attention immediately drawn to the wallet. For some reason, pictures of cats depositing dead things on their masters’ porches came to his mind.

MONEY

The journalist stared at it for several more seconds, then dropped his head in his hands. “From the cop we screamed at?” 

YUP

“Oh God. And I thought you were being nice by not biting his head off.”

BUT NOW WE HAVE MONEY

Eddie opened the wallet to check the ID then dropped it outright, staring at his fingers. “Agh, idiot!”

AH YES BECAUSE HE WOULDN’T KNOW WE STOLE IT OTHERWISE 

EDDIE NO

His host attempted to pitch the wallet out the window, only to have Venom snatch it back before the accessory could get more than a foot away.

AT LEAST TAKE THE MONEY OUT FIRST

“We’re not stealing from a cop!”

GET IT BACK FROM NELSON

“Or from a lawyer!”

Venom didn’t know what to do. Eddie sat there, indignant and moralistic, meanwhile both of them were starving. Whatever humans typically lived on, it wasn’t hotel breakfasts and this wasn’t living. 

DO WE HAVE TO RUN AGAIN

Eddie glared down at his uniform, as if it (and not Venom) had betrayed him. The journalist took a breath then gave up on whatever statement he had planned to make. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and put it on the charger they had stolen at the coffeeshop earlier where people were less attentive. He scrolling through his contacts and eventually sat staring at Nelson’s number.

EDDIE DO WE HAVE TO GO

“Did you plan this?” the host asked. A flicker of anger went through Venom and only the room being too small and full of hard things (a sharp-edged table, box spring with jagged edges, etc.) kept the symbiote from replying physically. They had TRIED, unlike Eddie, who had gone to sleep instead of finding them food! 

NO EDDIE

WE JUST NEEDED FOOD

The host sagged a little, looking weary. “No, I get it. Sorry.” 

DO WE HAVE TO GO

Eddie glanced at the contacts in his phone again before locking it. “…no. We need this, and he said the landlord might quit working with them. We can’t mess that up for everyone else.” He snagged the wallet with his free hand. Took a deep breath. “We’ll return the wallet and the backpack to the station, untouched.”

LOSER

Venom engulfed the entire pile of candy bars, protein bars, and three of the hot dogs before the journalist could stop him. Eddie snatched the remains of the new backpack (which was a bit damp from drool, now) and headed for the door. 

WE’LL GET ARRESTED, the symbiote growled.

“Not if we’re quick. Oh, shit.” Eddie glanced down at the uniform and turned around to grab different clothes. If they were seen in uniform, all the stealth in the world wouldn’t matter.

#

“Mr. Sym, right?” Nelson sat at the one of the coffeeshop’s window-adjacent tables, which was barely large enough to accommodate the size of his laptop (or Nelson, for that matter). An industrial-strength coffee sat on the windowsill, with another one on the small, remaining section of the table. Eddie dragged his symbiote’s attention away from the display case of pastries and sat down across from the lawyer. It felt like he had been spending way too much time at cafes, much less ones that had a TV chattering over the countertop.

“Yeah, I usually go by Eddie.” Eddie grabbed the mega-coffee and took a sip. “I thought we’d meet at the landlord’s office.”

“We will, I just wanted to go over a few things with you first. How was the first shift?”

“Fine, fine.” He adjusted the position of their backpack of essentials under the table, which he’d brought just in case all of this went horribly wrong.

“Any run ins with the local cops?” Nelson asked, making notes of their conversation.

“No, I’ve kept my head down.”

“Okay…” Nelson smiled, a slightly sympathetic gesture, and pulled out a manila envelope. “That’s good, because this isn’t you outside of the convenience store last night then.” Nelson slid a photograph of their escape from the ambush the night before across the table. “Or you this morning outside of the police station.” Another photo. Who the hell taking these shots? Eddie prided himself on being a good photographer, once upon a time, but somebody was making bank on these.

“Yeah, that’s us,” he said, deciding to bite the conversational bullet. “Sorry we couldn’t return the full backpack, somebody got hungry.” He explained about crashing his bike and about the loss of his card/bribing of cops, just to explain how they had fallen so far as to be knocking over convenience stores. By the time he was done, Nelson sat back, stunned. 

“…so,” Nelson said with caution. “Don’t lead into our interview with the cops thing. Say that trying to keep your head above water in California left you living paycheck to paycheck.”

“Can do.”

In the back of his mind, Venom made an incredulous noise. Fortunately, Nelson checked the time on his phone and missed Eddie’s mouthed ‘shut up!’ whisper to the symbiote. “The real estate office is right next door and I took the liberty—” the lawyer fumbled behind his chair for something and handed over a shopping bag to Eddie. “Of making sure you had interview-ready clothes. Lang guessed at the sizes, so if they don’t fit, blame him.”

Eddie took the bag, almost in shock. “Uh… Nelson, I don’t know what you think the retainer’s going to be like but—”

“Nobody’s going to be billing you,” Nelson said. 

“Aren’t you a lawyer?” Eddie demanded. He harbored a well-tended suspicion of people who helped people with powers, especially if they did it for free. People with powers were volatile. You could literally get your head bit off. Working with them when there wasn’t a glint of paid healthcare or travel stipend in sight made Nelson a strange bird in a forest of vulnerability and he didn’t like it. It was one of the reasons the journalist was bringing his backpack to the bathroom.

“So they say.” The self-affirmed lawyer made a shooing motion with his hands. “Clothes. Our guy isn’t going to wait forever.” 

#

Eddie felt like an idiot. Button-down shirts were an old friend on fancy interviews, slacks he could handle (even if they were tighter than he would voluntarily wear), and the socks were a nice touch. The tie had little Spidermans on it and the shoes didn’t fit. At all. If he wore them longer than two minutes of walking or standing, he’d start limping. 

WE DON’T WANT TO DO THIS

“But we can’t keep living in a hotel,” Eddie said, keeping his voice down because not only was talking to himself weird, talking in a men’s bathroom was weird. He felt strange enough about staying in the single stall, still wearing his tennis shoes, hoping Nelson would… leave. “We need housing. This is practical, it’ll cost less than most other places on the coast. We need this.”

That thought got him out of the stall, still in his tennis shoes, but couldn’t get him out of the bathroom. He stayed there until he found that one of his feet was braced on the windowsill of the low window. It looked just small enough to accommodate his frame if he wriggled a bit.

Wouldn’t THAT be something for Nelson to come in to, especially if Eddie found that he couldn’t fit through the window. And where would he go if he got out?

NEW YORK, Venom queried, sounding almost bright for the symbiote. Eddie didn’t feel much about that plan. THEN SAN FRANCISCO. Or about returning to San Francisco, even if he did have some faint memories of his estranged father living there (last he heard).

When he paid attention to his movements again, he found that he had ducked out of the window and stood in the streets.

USELESS, Venom growled. THE POLICEMAN FROM LAST NIGHT WALKED IN AND YOUR USELESS ASS DIDN’T MOVE

Eddie knew better than to look back and gawk. He started walking a little faster. “Wallet guy? But YOU screamed at him, how could he recognize—”

FACES ON TV EDDIE

Shit. The symbiote must be referencing the television at the café, which Eddie had been studiously ignoring. “How bad?”

RUN

Eddie broke into a run, just in time to hear someone behind him shout for him to freeze. “Maskmaskmasmas—thank you!”

As Venom, they could make their way up to a rooftop fast, waiting a moment to see if the police spotted them. 

WHERE WILL WE GO

“I’m not sure yet. If somebody got it on video or something, that’d be bad.”

“Well,” came a puffing voice from behind them, from the direction of the building’s fire escape. “You were live-streamed changing so, you know, that’s never good.”

“Nelson,” Eddie said, half-turning and attempting to calm Venom at the same time. “Ah, sorry, we—”

“It’s fine, it’s fine. I’m getting used to people leaving.” The lawyer chuckled at Eddie’s alarmed expression. “Because they’re free to do it and it doesn’t mean they violated an arrest warrant. Okay, but that comment’s not helping. Okay. What would help you most, right now?”

“HUNGRYshut up, V, he meant in a broader sense…” Eddie trailed off as Nelson produced half a dozen protein bars from his pocket and held them out. They were even in semi-new condition. Eddie looked from the bars to the lawyer.

“How many people have you done this with?” the journalist asked, the symbiote snatching the food away from Nelson.

“Nineteen. And no, you’re not an unusual case. Four actually had to be bailed out of jail before they could get housing and nine were on the run from the cops. Literally.”

“Okay...” Eddie took a breath. “So, the situation is that, even if I wasn’t… filmed on the internet for being this, Oregon wouldn’t accept us until we pay off the motorcycle crash, and whatever arrest warrant was filed for last night. I’m expecting a phone call any minute to announce the security company’s seen the news and I’ve been fired.” If nothing else, his coworkers would probably be gossiping that the new hire moonlighted as a guy in a Venom suit knocking over convenience stores. 

“So, we can’t stay here,” he finished.

“Did you want to?” Nelson asked. 

“I thought housing might be easier.” He’d thought it would be practical. Apparently practical shouldn’t be at the top of his list with the symbiote in tow.

WE CAN BE PRACTICAL

WE’LL EAT THE LAWYER AND THEN NOT BE HUNGRY

Yup, impractical. He needed to live so as to do the least damage and have the least damage done to Venom. Nelson glanced over the edge of the rooftop, observing the crowd of police below. “Ah, well, I know you can get down from here, but I’d appreciate—”

“Yeah, sorry not sorry!” Venom leapt from their roof to another one, then the next. Nelson sighed visibly, but made no other response. Almost as if he had someone who did this to him all the time. Meanwhile, Eddie groaned.

‘sorry not sorry’

‘seriously’

‘could we be less—’

“Well, -I- wanted to eat him,” Venom replied, landing heavily on the cement adjacent to the bus station. “And it’s our turn to decide where we go.”

‘no the agreement was that you could find food’

“We are changing it.”


	6. I can run from the law, I can run from myself

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So… Ao3 is telling me I haven’t updated this fic since 10/28. I don’t know where that time went. Like, at all. I would’ve sworn I updated this three weeks ago. Apparently, and unsurprisingly, I don’t do two fics at once well at all. And I keep freaking myself because I'm only allowed myself 8 chapters for this fic and what the hell was I thinking. But we'll get through it. :D 
> 
> So, THANK YOU, as always, for your patience. And reading and commenting and kudosing and anything else. <3 
> 
> Chapter title is from 'Runs in the Family' by Amanda Palmer.
> 
> 12.16: Edits for phrasing clarity. I realize yesterday's was still kind of rough.

Eddie argued.

He felt certain he was just a buzzing noise in the back of Venom’s mind for the next four days, but he argued the hell out of it. They couldn’t travel to New York by foot, he shouted at the symbiote. There was a giant patch of land called the Midwest that they would hit and there were supers in New York who were going to take the news that a goo alien was galloping across the continent… badly, to say the least. And, of course, there was the fact that they had been on television, and CONTINUED to be on television, as long as they kept running because what Midwest news station didn’t want to film a symbiote?

Venom replied that Eddie must be allowing this and that it was best for both of them. Smugly.

So, he’d continued yelling at Venom, yelled at himself, and yet his voice fell flat when he tried to explain (or imagine) any realistic alternatives. Nelson wouldn’t take them back and he shouldn’t. Eddie wanted a drink, but he knew nothing about bars in any of the places they blazed through and Venom had insisted they weren’t stopping for ‘drinks.’ Eddie didn't have a lot of control over that; his attempts to knock the symbiote out slowed their pace, but not for long and not by much. When the journalist got tired, which was all the time because his damn body felt like shit from housing a manically-running Venom symbiote suit, he would fall asleep. He usually woke up to find them still running.

It was early, some bright morning on one of the days, when Venom stopped running. The symbiote then vanished inside Eddie, leaving the host’s body standing, unsupported and unsteady, in the middle of the woods.

Eddie shook himself to wakefulness when they fell over. From his vantage point on the ground, he could see extensive underbrush. They were in the woods. They could've stopped because of bears, again, and Venom would be back in seconds for a fight. God, Eddie hoped it wasn’t bears. Eating bear might be fine in the Oregon Trail game but he had the sneaking suspicion that bear meat was better cooked. Venom wasn’t even saying anything, so the journalist pushed himself to his feet and scanned their immediate surroundings -- for bears or whatever else had stopped them.

Nothing dropped on them from a tree. Every part of his body felt like a marathoner’s nightmare, so he had to keep shifting his weight to avoid falling over.

“V…?” he inquired.

“That stand for something?” a kid’s voice said. It was above them – far above them. Eddie chanced a glance up at the trees, just for a second, but saw nothing.

“…go away, kid!” What would make a kid go away from something interesting in the woods? “It’s probably time for your dinner!”

“Oh man, it's 8 a.m., it probably is! Gosh, thanks for reminding me, random guy!”

Eddie wondered if the ‘mask’ technique would scare him off. It had worked on his obnoxious neighbor, true, but kids were a different matter, not to mention the kid in this situation was something like seventy feet over his head. Maybe he and Venom could jump that high? Get the kid on the run? He didn’t particularly want to ask the symbiote though. They were going to have a hell of a fight about this already and he was beginning to notice they felt ILL. Not just sore from the run -- ill, like legitimately, might-throw-up-in-the-next-fifteen-minutes, ill.

“You don’t want to stick around here, kid!” he yelled up at the trees, trying to make himself sound as menacing as possible. When he pitched his voice low, he could sound like Venom's gravelly tones. What came out this time sounded a LOT like Venom – but activating his lower tones triggered his gag reflex. Ugh, don't be sick. Keep it together.

In response to his Venom-esque threat, webs came shooting out of one of the trees. Eddie stepped quickly out of their path – but no further. Venom was good at sensing the severity of attacks and would probably speak up if this was an encounter they should run from. But, if this was a kid messing around, he wasn’t under any real danger. Which was good; his body wasn't going to be back in running shape for a while.

“Cute!” Eddie called up, running a mental index of who it could be and why they had beef with him/them. Spiderman had webs, right? Maybe this was upstate New York. Then again, hell, Venom could have gotten lost, maybe this was Maine. “Go away. I’m not looking for new friends.”

“Aw, but my aunt’s trying to build out her Christmas card list.” Another web, another side step. The kid meant business. Wasn’t connecting to anything, but meant business.

“Sorry if we’re trespassing,” Eddie said. “Sometimes joyrides can go a little too far.” How far exactly, that was the question.

“You expect me to believe you’re heading home NOW?” the kid asked. “I figured you just took a wrong turn.” The next web exploded at the height of Eddie’s face. The journalist took a step backwards, hand lifted to shield himself, which was when the roar of Venom’s voice came back. The symbiote demanded to be allowed to take over again, and that “EDDIE YOU’LL GET US KILLED,” but both of them knew the symbiote was too worn out to override Eddie’s defenses. There were some perks to being the guy who got to sleep for three days. Three days? Four days? He wasn’t sure.

“We’re heading to New York,” Eddie said, looking up and using his fingers as a filter to scan the sunlit foliage above their heads. Bright rays of light filtered through, making it impossible to see much in the way of web-shooting people. Wait. Those were redwoods. “Or… we were? V, are we back in California?”

“Yeah… you got to the far end of South Dakota and turned around.” The kid seemed surprised by Eddie’s reaction. “You didn’t know that? Ah man. Communication really is the cornerstone of a healthy relationship with your parasite.”

“Am—are we back in California then?” He addressed the question to Venom, who was already growling at the word ‘parasite’. “Did you drag me more than halfway across the continent and turn AROUND?”

IT WAS SO FAR EDDIE

YOU LIVE IN SUCH A STUPID PLACE

“All the states are shorter after South Dakota!”

HOW WERE WE SUPPOSED TO KNOW

“You could’ve asked me!” Eddie snapped. “Now we’re freaking—wait, so who is this kid if we aren’t in upstate New York?”

“Well, you were using a lot of my skill set while you were travelling and Mister Stark said that I’d be better at—”

“Get down here!” Eddie yelled up at the trees, feeling like an old man shouting at kids to get off his lawn. “I keep feeling like you’re going to drop on our head.”

“Rude.” The kid dropped, WAY too far for a kid to fall safely, swung a little at the last minute, and straightened his stance to stand on the forest floor, some sixty feet away from the symbiotic pair. It was Spiderman, or at least a not-too-tall person wearing Spiderman’s outfit. It was a miracle Eddie had missed the primary colors, even with the trees. “Drop bears only occur in Australia. Wait, did you come from Australia? That would make SO much sense.”

“No,” Eddie said, assessing his ‘opponent.’ “I’m from New York. My… other is from space.”

KLYNTAR

“Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. So, what brought on the Forrest Gump impression?”

“The… what?”

“Sorry, to run across the United States.”

“Well, like I said, we were going to New York.”

“I know, but you weren’t departing from SFO or arriving in JFK. Ohhh, can you not use airports? Set off the beeper thing? I get that, always forgetting webfluid counts as fluid, that’s me.”

Eddie stared. The kid seemed to be trying to get under his skin. Why? Was he stalling for another attack to come? Why was Spiderman here? He couldn’t seriously have been assigned to come by ‘Mister Stark’ and travelled across the country to hunt a killer alien. And he just kept talking.

“Why you want to go to New York anyway?” Spiderman continued. “It’s the end of November, it’s so cold over there I had to shovel myself out of a snowbank to come here. You’ve got an alien to think about now, Ed, you can’t just run across the country like you used to.”

“I didn’t want to go to New York. I wanted to go home.” Eddie took a breath, fighting back the memories of New York City in the winter. True, there was a very real risk of freezing to death, as opposed to merely being really uncomfortable and frostbitten in Northern California, but he had gotten used to the cold by the time he moved. “And home is San Francisco.” – which kind of got a winter, if you squinted and headed up into the hills.

“So, the MOST expensive place to go find housing. Gotcha.”

“I didn’t say I could afford to live there, I said it’s my _home_ ,” Eddie snarled and that was it, the kid had finally gotten under his skin. “My “alien” thought going back to New York would be better for us.” And for Venom, because with Eddie unable to protest, they’d had tater tots and chocolate for what felt like ALL the meals. That probably accounted for the ill feeling in their gut. Now that he was back in their body, it felt startlingly similar to the time he had eaten eight containers of Burger King onion rings on a college dare. God, he needed Spiderman to leave so he could throw up.

“Have you considered living in Australia?” Spiderman asked. “You could really be yourself, blend in. Probably be one of the cool kids.”

“You said Mister Stark sent you?” Eddie asked, trying not to sound as miserable as his stomach was letting him know it was. “Maybe you could get him to come pick you up?”

“Well, y’know he didn’t just randomly send me. Avengers get MISSIONS to—”

Without consulting Eddie, Venom attempted to strike Spiderman, ostensibly to knock the younger man into a tree so they could run away. This didn’t work. The Spiderman jumped over the webbing, white globes around his eyes going wide with surprise, and, after landing, leapt at the nearest tree, then to another tree. Venom growled, in the back of Eddie’s mind, and urged him to ‘HELP YOU LOSER DON’T JUST STAND THERE’

“He’s not attacking us yet,” Eddie hissed, keeping an eye on the Spiderman as he moved from tree to tree. He appeared to be able to stick to anything, not deterred by frost, incline, or the rough texture of the bark.

“Yeah, cause I didn’t actually come here to FIGHT you,” Spiderman said. He finally sounded irritated. “Which if you’d stop—”

Venom tried again. The kid dodged easily.

“Attacking, you’d find out that—”

Again. Nope. Eddie heard the thwip of webs and stepped backwards, only to find Venom had lost whatever shreds of patience the symbiote had left. Black tendrils grabbed the web Spiderman had shot at them and flung it at a different tree. Taking this in, Eddie looked to Spiderman for his reaction. The kid had shifted to an attack position. It was suddenly a bad time to be standing on the forest floor.

“You’re really flipping the script here. People are using me if -I- ever stop,” Spiderman said.

“No one ever told you how competitive journalism is?” Eddie said, calling up part of the protective Venom suit so he wasn’t just standing out here like an idiot. “All we do is flip the script.”

It was just a kid, he reminded himself. He didn’t need any enemies when he felt this ill (damn you, Venom) and had been running four days. He hoped it was only four days, that Venom hadn’t been lying about that as well and they had been running for a week or something. He needed to check his phone for the date. A quick check of his face clued him into the fact that he had at least a week’s worth of beard. Venom expressed their relief that Eddie was finally angry at the kid. 

“I’m not angry at the kid!” Eddie shouted at Venom, running towards the edge of the clearing. “We’ve been running for a WEEK?”

“Yeah? And you really tore up some stuff in Wyoming,” Spiderman said, beginning to stagger web after web around the area which Eddie and Venom were trying to escape. “Which is impressive aim, cause, y’know, not much there to attack.”

The symbiotic pair jumped straight up, out of the tightening web trap and into the lower branches of one of the redwoods. Eddie remembered Wyoming… well, he remembered a lot of sagebrush. Lot of wilderness. Damnit, if Venom hadn’t kept him shut out, they wouldn’t be fighting Spiderman right now.

“I never did this to you,” Eddie hissed at the symbiote, even as he grasped for another handhold on their tree.

WE ARE BETTER AT AGREEING WITH YOU, the symbiote said smugly. Then: EDDIE DON’T CLIMB 

HE’S GOOD AT CLIMBING

“He’s good at NYC buildings, he’s not good at—” One of Venom’s tendrils flicked out and cut Spiderman’s webbing line as the webslinger got close. Eddie froze.

“Okay, so he’s good at trees too.”

TOLD YOU

“Yeah, we don’t have time for this. Hey Spiderboy!”

The kid perched on another branch, some ways out of reach of Venom’s tendrils. Spiderman groaned at the mis-naming and grumbled something about ‘how are you even from New York, it’s SpiderMAN, SpiderMAN’ before replying: “Yeah, Viral?”

“What do you want with us?” Eddie gripped the redwood’s unyielding bark just a little tighter, hoping that whatever it was could be easily resolved and they’d move forward. More importantly, that Spiderman could leave and he could get down.

WE WON’T LET YOU FALL EDDIE

“Thanks, that will be really comforting while I’m being sick all over woodland creatures from a great height,” Eddie replied. “Did you _have_ to eat tater tots and chocolate for every meal?”

YOU DIDN’T SAY NO

“I said no to EVERYTHING. The whole time!”

BUT YOU LIKE CHOCOLATE

AND WE NEED CHOCOLATE

“Ah, so did you still want to know what you were being brought in for?” Spiderman didn’t sound all that contrite as he inched closer. “I can’t really read you your rights or anything.”

“Yes,” Eddie said, interrupting their argument. Venom hissed in the back of his mind, not enjoying Spiderman’s ever closing the gap between them.

“First, I’m supposed to tell you that Nelson took care of the bike crash, the stolen stuff, and the job abandonment,” Spiderman said, sounding certain that this needed to come before anything else. “And to tell you he really doesn’t want those clothes back. Ever.”

That made sense. “And?”

“And that you have an Insta page devoted to sightings of you in—or as? With? The suit?”

Eddie sighed. Of course there were social media sightings. Damn. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, once you pick a city, you’ll be locally trending all the time, so I’m listing the perks, but anyway—”

“What do you mean ‘pick a city’?” Eddie interrupted. “We don’t get to pick a city. We don’t want to—WE WANT TO.” He cleared his throat and tried to shush Venom. It didn’t work. “HE IS GARBAGE WITHOUT A CITY AND FORGETS TO EAT AND JUST WANTS TO DRINK—V, please stop—IF WE HAVE THE CHANCE TO PICK A CITY AND BE A PROTECTOR WE WILL FORGIVE YOU FOR CALLING US THAT THING YOU CALLED US”

Spiderman’s full-face mask didn’t really accommodate things like facial expressions, but Eddie could recognize confusion by the narrowing white globes of his eyes and slight head tilt.

“Thanks, Venom, glad we jointly decided that we were going to be super personal with the super who hasn’t promised us a thing. And you,” he addressed Spiderman. “You still haven’t said what you want us for. I know there are still arrest warrants out for what we did with the Life Foundation.” He shifted position, nudging his way towards a lower branch and the eventual safety of the forest floor. Spiderman followed them with nauseating grace.

“You’re right. But, I mean, everyone on the Avengers’ roster right now has a couple of arrest records.”

“For _mind control_ or _nationally-required treason_ ,” Eddie pointed out. “I did the things we did, mostly. We killed people who were doing their jobs.” And at least one man in a convenience store in the Tenderloin, but no one had found him or asked about him. “Anyway, that’s the Avengers. Venom and I, we’ve saved the world all of once. And we don’t go out of our way to do it.” Oh God, he was going to be sick. Another fifteen feet loomed between him and the ground. They could fall that and be fine, but falling might trigger puking and he had the sneaking suspicion Spiderman was trying to ask him something important.

“Iron Man wasn’t saying your placement wasn’t probationary,” Spiderman replied, continuing to follow their path down. “Ant Man said he’d offer a diversion program in San Francisco. Since we don’t know exactly who knows you’re Venom, you’ll have to keep pretty much to yourself aside from heroing. It might be better that way for you though, right?” The kid sounded nervous, and he should be. He probably knew nothing about disappearing into an identity and closing yourself off.

Eddie, on the other hand, knew exactly what the kid meant. ‘Pretty much to yourself’ meant: ‘don’t leave the house,’ ‘don’t use social media,’ ‘don’t try to meet women,’ and DEFINITELY ‘don’t get drunk and leave the house’. Eddie wasn’t sure what the hell Lang meant by ‘a diversion program’ but it sounded vaguely like they were being asked to join the Avengers. He asked as much.

“Kinda…?” the kid replied. “They’re a little messy right now – civil war issues – but open to recruitment.”

“Uh, we don’t really—”

Nausea swept over him. He found that he couldn’t hang onto the branch anymore. Venom caught them before they hit the ground, deposited Eddie near the base of a different tree, then zooped (stretched? Glooped?) part of its fluid form to act as a shield between Eddie and the Spiderman. His stomach heaved. He had a sudden and unpleasant memory of Venom encountering a badger and oh God…

In between… noises, he could hear the kid asking thirteen-thousand questions of Venom. At this point, he was reasonably certain that the best day of the kid’s life had been when he was asked to join the Avengers, despite the fact that he hadn’t accepted (apparently). “How far can you stretch?” Spiderman asked …and Venom told him. “Can you shoot webs or just the floaty things?” …and Venom told him. “What was your planet like?” …and Venom told him. And on and on and on. Finally, Eddie wiped his face with his sleeve and pushed himself shakily to his feet.

“…venom,” he said, voice rasping. His feet seemed like they were going to hold out for a minute at least. After the running and the puking, there was no guaranteeing for how long.

LOSER THIS CHILD WANTS US TO BE PART OF AN INTERPLANETARY DEFENSE FORCE AND YOU’VE BEEN EXPELLING FLUIDS THE WHOLE TIME

“do you want to do that?”

OBVIOUSLY

Great. Venom had just demonstrated that the symbiote could drive the host as long as it took to do what it wanted so, what was the point in saying no? The journalist fought to remain standing at the thought of being dragged around as an Avenger for the next year. Or longer. Thankfully he was already out of the area of the vomit. He took a breath to start their inevitable argument and it almost triggered the gag reflex again. God, despite the sleep, being stuck in this sick body felt hellish. Venom snorted when Eddie turned the breath into a sigh instead of a protest.

WHAT DID YOU WANT TO DO

“…that’s fine.”

When Eddie didn’t add anything else to the statement, he sensed the symbiote’s confusion. He didn’t typically agree, point blank, to life-changing ideas and Venom knew it. His other’s confident tone had been to set the tone for the argument and, when Eddie’s half of the argument wasn’t forthcoming, it threw off their fragile balance. Venom's next words sounded more hesitant than normal.

WE REALIZE WE WERE… INTENT… ON ARRIVING IN NEW YORK

Eddie ignored the statement, wishing there was a close, non-puked-on tree he could lean against. Meanwhile, Spiderman stood in the background of their conversation, resolutely not making eye contact with the pair. It occurred to Eddie that the kid was waiting to take them to, hell, Stark’s spaceship or the Wakandan spaceship or the Avengers quinjet. While he didn’t love the idea, he was relieved to find that they weren’t going to have to run anymore. Yay Avengers and your highly mobile spacecraft.

EDDIE

“mm?”

WE WATCHED TV WHEN YOU WERE ASLEEP IN THE MOTEL

“oh. cool?” The idea of Venom watching Golden Girls reruns at 3 a.m. flickered through his mind. It would explain the symbiote’s growing sense of humor.

WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T HAVE A HOME AND YOU DRINK AND YOU GET SAD

TERRIBLE THINGS EDDIE

Shit, the symbiote had been watching Hallmark or the news or both.

WE ARE BETTER THAN THAT

Okay, that idea just took the cake. Anger overcame nausea, for a second.

“venom.”

EDDIE

“you made me eat _SOLELY TATER TOTS AND CHOCOLATE_ for _A WEEK_. and possibly a _BADGER_. _YOU_ are not better than _ANYTHING!_ ” Yelling scorched the inside of his throat. He had to grit his teeth to keep the bile down.

TTCH WE ARE VENOM AND WE ARE AN AVENGER

WE’RE BETTER THAN EVERYTHING

“do it on your own then,” Eddie said. It was the only bargaining chip he had and they both knew it. The symbiote bared a hundred pointy teeth.

WE WERE HELPING

“taking me on a marathon tour of the US is not helping. you could’ve killed me.”

YOU WERE KILLING YOU

US

“You’re the one who dragged us out of Oregon!” Eddie snapped. And the one to steal the backpack and to bribe the cops originally.

“oooohkay this seems really personal, so I’m gonna, just, go a little—” Spiderman tried to edge away from the pair, stopped only by Venom snagging one of his wrists. The kid stared at it, those large white orbs expanding in shock. “Whoa I didn’t even—I can’t sense your…”

A second later, a wave of laser-focused pain rippled through their connection. Eddie staggered and Spiderman leapt free, back up into the redwoods. Venom hissed, reabsorbing the tendril that had been holding the kid’s wrist. The appendage looked burned.

“Instant kill mode!” Spiderman yelled down at them. “I know you’re supposed to yell out your attacks before you do them, but that’s just dumb!”

Despite the pain, Eddie relaxed somewhat at knowing the kid was out of range. If he couldn’t stop Venom from having a tantrum, it was good someone else could.

“See, kid, I don’t think we’d make reliable Avengers!” he shouted, coughing to try and clear his throat.

“I really just think you guys aren’t apologizing to each other enough,” the kid continued. His voice kept moving around the trees, most likely to stay out of Venom’s way, but also possibly to launch another attack. The thought filled Eddie with dread. If anything else was going on, if the ‘join the Avengers’ bit was a farce, they were sitting ducks here. Bickering, meanwhile, a harmless-looking Spiderkid could take them both out.

“venom,” the journalist said.

WE ARE NOT APOLOGIZING

WE WERE DOING WHAT IS BEST FOR US AND YOU KNOW IT

“I’m sure you mean to. fact is, it didn’t work that way this time and now I’m seriously worried you’re going to attack the kid ‘cause you’re mad at me.”

THE CHILD IS ANTAGONIZING US

“but you’re mad at me.”

YOU’RE TOO STUPID AND WEAK AND WORRIED TO BE CAPABLE OF BOTHERING ME

Eddie had meant to apologize, he really had, but the part of him that had reclaimed shreds of dignity, the part that screamed ‘not a loser,’ reared back against this statement. He reminded himself, again, that it was his job to keep Venom in check. The symbiote could attack the kid otherwise—

WE WOULD NOT ATTACK A CHILD

STOP THINKING THAT

“Oh, cool,” the Spiderman said from somewhere up in the trees. “Cause, you know that wasn’t telegraphing.”

Venom growled in the general direction of the voice and Spiderman shut up again. The superhero’s silence added one more worry to Eddie’s portfolio of worries: what if Spiderman was calling someone for help? And help for Spiderman probably meant restraints or backup against Venom.

“we should go,” he told the symbiote, who grunted in agreement.

SOMEONE ELSE HAS BEEN HERE

The words were solely inside Eddie’s head, which felt like a whisper after the shouted conversations they’d been having.

“where?”

TINY

WE JUST SENSED IT

“where??”

WE DON’T KNOW

WE’RE GOING

“great.” Casting one final glance at the trees above, Eddie called up the full suit and began moving slowly towards the continuing woods. Spiderman had seemed surprised when Venom grabbed his arm earlier and had begun to say something along the lines of ‘I didn’t see that coming’. In interviews (ridiculously few and far between as they were), Spiderman had mentioned having a sort of sense that notified him when he was in danger. His crime-fighting skills held up this statement. But Venom seemed to be outside of his range of perception, at least when it came to danger.

Maybe it would hold up for camouflage too.

WE CAN DO CAMOUFLAGE

The suit seemed to seep into of the background, flattening colors from both Venom’s monochrome and the abused interview clothes Eddie wore until the pair reflected only earth tones. Eddie knew better than to stop and marvel at clothing, but he did think, loudly: ‘I didn’t know we could do that.’

WE TOLD YOU WE WERE BETTER THAN ANYTHING

Including colors, apparently. They made it another forty feet and Spiderman, while audibly concerned that he couldn’t see them, didn’t appear to know that they had left.

“alternate plan?” Eddie whispered, once they had gone fifty feet from where they had left Spiderman.

WE’LL RUN

“no, no more running. I can’t run anymore.”

IT’S THAT OR TREES EDDIE

“as you know, I love trees.”

GET READY

“wait, no, but not HEIGH—”

Wait, who the hell had clotheslined him? Eddie slammed into the ground, in a total state of confusion. He’d felt the usual jerk of the rest of his body as Venom prepared to fling them up as many feet as possible. But, instead of gliding up, they had hit someone’s outstretched arm and been knocked breathless to the ground. Eddie coughed, sucking air.

“oh god.”

IT WASN’T SPIDERMAN, Venom noted. THE TINY PERSON

“thanks, you’re so helpful,” Eddie said between coughs and rolled over onto his side, pushing them to their feet – just in time for him to hear the ‘thwip’ of webs some ways behind them. Shit. Spiderman would be here any minute, like the creepy fast spiders which the kid had named himself. Eeesh. Trees were no good. Running was out of the question, for breathing reasons as much as anything.

WE’LL FIGHT HIM

“We’re not fighting a kid.” Eddie got to their feet and, against all of his better judgment, started running. He hadn’t gone ten feet before he was clotheslined again. He grabbed the arm on his way down, angry as hell, and dug in his fingernails to some leathery steel suit texture. Then, well then, he was pretty sure Venom bit it. Not deeply, definitely not as deeply as the symbiote could, but enough that the arm’s immediate motivation became to be as far away from them as possible.

“Ow!” came Scott Lang’s yelp of pain. Eddie let go and Lang punched Venom in the symbiote’s floating, teeth-filled face. Eddie winced in sympathy, even as he backed away. Lang shook out his arm, shaking off blood. 

“Geez, Brock.”

“Not sorry.” Eddie kept retreating, Venom following their connection. “You could’ve called first.”

“With that phone you don’t have?”

“I have a phone.”

“Your number is out of service then.”

Eddie kept retreating. Lang had noticed by now and pushed up the helmet to reveal a bemused expression. He wasn’t following yet. Instead, he put his hands on his hips. “So, it looks like you didn’t take my advice and go to the La Quinta in town.”

“All full.” Eddie didn’t care if Lang spotted the lie.

“How was Oregon?”

“How long did it take you to come up with a ‘diversion program’?” Eddie replied. He’d reached the limit of how far he could back up without prompting Lang into stepping forward to hear him… and beginning to follow.

“Pretty much as soon as I realized you were skipping town. You knew about the Life Foundation stuff, but I’m guessing you haven’t been monitoring the gross civil war/Avengers stuff.”

Eddie felt a little offended at that. He’d read all the available information about the Sokovia incident; he’d noted the ever-growing span of information about Wakanda and its warrior-king. He noticed when Ant-Man and the Wasp showed up in San Francisco, the implosion of Pym/Cross Industries, and knew that it left a major path open for Carlton Drake’s entry into the area. The Avengers’ fights, gods, explosions, federal treason, and Accords were all much more an east coast thing and had as much impact on the west coast as the east’s winter storms did.

Lang explained that the Avengers’ teams had split in half, more or less, following the accords. Iron Man and Captain America had had a big fight, which Lang had helped with, and been under house arrest for a while because of it. But now, Scott was out of house arrest, running his company, and trying to help other people become Avengers, y’know, before anybody decided to attack the entire Earth.

Personally, Eddie thought that saying a team composed of a bunch of Americans (and a Russian and a self-proclaimed god) could save the world sounded… like nationalized hubris. No militaries, course not, just The Avengers. Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. As in they Might or Might Not stop bickering among themselves long enough to show up.

“Lang, we don’t want to be an Avenger. I’d like to get paid, and Venom likes biting people’s heads off for a good cause. Or any cause.” And, yes, they liked being the ones to save the world, but primarily because there were no other comers. The Life Foundation had been small-scale by the Avengers’ standards. Venom might want to be an ‘Avenger’ but solely because it involved biting people’s heads off. Stuff like the New York incident, several years back, wouldn’t be solved with that.

“Then think of the Avengers as backup,” Lang said. “You’re telling me there weren’t any moments where you thought you could use backup?”

“I HAD backup. And if I was with Venom, we never needed superhero backup.” He’d only gotten in trouble when separated from the symbiote. The ‘trouble’ had been getting fatally stabbed or about to have his head bitten off, but it hadn’t required Thor to pitch a hammer and wouldn't have been helped by Iron Man shooting lasers at it. None of that would’ve worked with Riot. Lang must have read the look on his face.

“Just listen to the pitch,” Lang said. “Okay? Then we’ll get food.”

MCDONALDS

Eddie felt distinctly ill at the thought of fried food. “Healthy food.”

MCDONALDS EDDIE

“Like a salad—AND CHOCOLATE—and, apparently, chocolate.”

“Can do.” Lang waved a hand at the trees, from which Spiderman descended to perch on one of the lower branches. Eddie looked from one to the other.

“So, insect buddies…? Also, how are we getting wherever this ‘pitch’ is?”

“Arachnid,” Spiderman called/corrected. “And the quinjet will be here any second.”

Despite the twinge of dread that this could still be a long game to get him onto the super-secret water prison Lang had described, Eddie breathed a sigh of relief. Food. Conversations that weren’t in his head. A lack of angry police chasing him across the country. The strange and implausible idea that they might be OKAY yanked at his conscience, refusing to be believed. They’d done things that – they shouldn’t be allowed indoors, much less in someone’s super-secret superhero organization.

“Lang, you wouldn’t turn us in, right?” he found himself asking. He wasn’t sure he could trust an ex-con in a biker suit; that didn’t change the fact that it was the best option he had. Scott Lang shook his head, having the good grace not to look offended.

“Swear. We would even do this here, but they like to make sure there’s a table between you and them. MY interview was kicking the crap out of the Falcon and they don’t want anyone to have the opportunity to repeat that.”

“And nobody tries anything with Venom,” Eddie said, trying to confirm the idea in his mind. It just seemed so unlikely that someone wanted both of them, alive and in one place. There had to be a lie somewhere, a catch. 

“I don’t think anybody but a bunch of Life Foundation scientists would have known how to.” Lang looked up at the redwoods, where an airship was now sinking through the trees, making about as much noise as a Tesla. “So believe me, nobody’s gonna do anything to Venom.”

A red-haired woman who Eddie faintly recognized as Black Widow stepped out of the quinjet. She didn’t spend more than a second looking him up and down. “Get in. You’re already late. And if you’ve hurt the Spiderkid, you’re going to be permanently late.”

Eddie assured her he hadn't, because he was pretty sure they hadn't, and got in. This version of the quinjet only sat four, so he sat down quickly in the seat closest to the exit, then took inventory of where everyone else was sitting. His barometer in the situation, Lang, sat directly across from him. Spiderman was next to Black Widow, who drove/flew. Black Widow and Spiderman, huh? Figures the spiders would protect their own.

He didn't mean to fall asleep, but Scott handed him some new clothes and it was the last thing he remembered.


	7. And I stood there wondering, what is the matter? Is this a matter of worse or of better?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I already know I’m going to have to go back and standardize pronouns for Venom. I think Eddie would think of Venom as he/him (though I’ve called Venom ‘it’ a lot while writing this, namely because I feel like this is early in their relationship and Eddie may still think of Venom as an invasive ‘thing’ in his body). Venom (might!) think of themselves as they/them. That’s at least… what I’m going with, and will have to rework later. 
> 
> Also? The next chapter will probably take a little longer to complete. But I do plan on things happening next chapter, rather than just an epilogue. :D #letsinfinitywar
> 
> Has anyone heard Rush Garcia’s ‘Everything I Have Vol. 1’ cd? I gave it to myself for Christmas and it’s _wonderful_
> 
> Chapter title is ‘The Bed Song’ from Amanda Palmer. It is kind of insane to do a Venom fic and NOT use The Killing Type but... hell, I couldn't find a good place for it. 
> 
> As always, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for reading, commenting, kudosing, and however else you interact with this fic.

“Brock. Hey, Brock, wake up.”

Eddie woke with no certainty of who had spoken to him. And ‘woke’ at this point meant he twitched out of bed, found the floor, then got shakily to a fighting position he’d seen once in a kung fu movie. Seeing as he had fallen asleep while buckled into the quinjet, his attempt to get up in the first place hit a roadblock. He coughed, thrown back against the seat and feeling distinctly clotheslined all over again. His breathing refused to calm down (and didn’t, for a full six minutes afterwards). His stomach roiled against his insides at the sudden movement, threatening to reprise the tater tots incident of earlier. He remembered the quinjet now. He was fairly sure it didn’t have a bathroom.

“Er,” Scott Lang’s voice said, more uncertain of itself than the voice that had told him to get up. “Hey, Eddie. So, we’ve just been talking with Venom…”

“Oh yeah?” Eddie unbuckled his seatbelt. His hands were trembling. “Nice of you to invite me.”

“It said—Venom said that you were tired,” Lang replied, looking like he had just figured out that that explanation might not be true. “And Spiderman said you’d been… sick. It seemed better to let you rest.”

“Funny, ‘cause I feel like I’ve been sleeping for _days_.” Eddie fought to calm his heart rate as he stood. “I’m an active participant in this body and I should be…participating.” Well, that was redundant.

“You mean, your body?” Lang asked. Eddie stared at him. It had been a minute since he thought of it as ‘his’, just his. 

“…yeah. But ours. Mine but ours.” He scanned the quinjet for any sign of a bathroom. Not finding one, he scooped up the new clothes from the floor and relaxed carefully into the seat again. Come on stomach, calm down. We’ve got nowhere to go from here. 

Venom collected some of their form on his shoulder, approximating a devil angel – made of black goo.

WE ARRANGED TO GET YOUR CARD BACK

“The card will be empty,” Eddie replied. “That’s what a bribe means.”

NOT WITH AVENGERS’ PAYCHECKS

Eddie looked suspiciously at Lang, sitting several seats away. “Did you try to swindle my symbiote into taking a job by promising I’d have a bank account?”

“Your symbiote is a strong, independent alien who don’t need no man telling them what to do.” Lang high-fived Spiderman for no apparent reason. “But in all seriousness, since you two share a body, yes, that is exactly what I tried to do, yes.”

“Lang, Venom _kills_ people.”

_WE_ KILL PEOPLE, Venom echoed happily. 

“You’ll encourage them to kill more people with all this talk of Avenging and before long, one of two things will happen,” Eddie continued. “Neither scenario ends well for me, in case you’re wondering.”

He wouldn’t be destroying his liver if he had a better option, after all. The more Venom ‘acted out,’ the further Eddie tried to push himself from the events that increasingly determined the boundaries of what ‘he’ did. Venom was at once every hero, every badass/who Eddie had wanted to be, and every instance of psychopathic nonsense the journalist had ever heard of. Making them an Avenger wasn’t going to make those impulses better; it would just validate the occurrence and require some kind of explanation for why. That wasn’t enough.

“Ven—you two, are not going to be called on in all situations,” Lang replied. “There are dozens of people interested in defending the planet. You can—”

“Say no?”

“Choose a city. Protect it. Think of the Avengers as being like the National Guard.”

“You know I spent some time in warzones, right? Telling me I’d only have to be there every other weekend doesn’t mean it’s any safer.” The thought sent a shudder of remembered panic through him. Eddie gritted his teeth against the second wave of nausea and was relieved to find that at least his breathing had calmed down. 

WE WILL KEEP US SAFE, Venom said aloud. YOU KNOW WE CAN

“We have massive weaknesses, Venom,” Eddie replied. “Fire isn’t hard to find or make on a battlefield.”

HUMANS DON’T THINK FIRE IS STRONG 

THEY WON’T USE IT

“That’s true,” Lang said helpfully. “We really don’t think it’s strong. See, you’ll be fine!”

“No.” Eddie came to a decision. “You don’t know what you’re asking and I’m not going to agree to it.”

BECAUSE YOU THINK WE’LL LEAVE YOU FOR A MORE ENTHUSIASTIC HOST

The journalist went silent. Venom didn’t need to know that he’d spent hours thinking about the chances of that happening and had always deemed them ‘pretty damn likely’ as soon as Venom found someone compatible. Eddie had always been, and would always be, the emergency choice. The convenient choice. The choice prone enough to Stockholm syndrome that it wouldn’t run away. But Venom would know Eddie thought that. They shared a body and a brain, they had no real secrets. 

OR THAT THEY’LL DECIDE TO PUT US DOWN FOR EATING TOO MANY PEOPLE

Eddie flushed. Growled, “yes, that’s what I’m worried about.”

WE DON’T NEED YOUR PERMISSION

The journalist felt part of his hope die with the words. Venom had already made their mind up to go be an Avenger. Given the abundance of hero-types in the Avengers, it wouldn’t take them long to find another suitable host. Hell, Venom had chosen _him_ as a compatible host; it wasn’t like the symbiote had high standards. The question became if Venom would want to stay with him during the search… or if they would leave with the Avengers. Here, now, today. 

Eddie wasn’t proud of it, but his thinking spiraled downwards from there. Say Venom left him today, with the Spiderkid or the terrifying Black Widow. He’d be alone. Again. Not like he ever did fantastic with that, but at least it was familiar ground. He could deal with ‘alone’ if he had to and for as long as he had to. He would be homeless, since he doubted the offer of housing was extended to unwilling non-Avenger hosts; vehicle-less, and, well, at least he might have a bank account with a clean number.

WE DO NEED YOUR SUPPORT

“Nn?” The words cut through the fog of growing gray.

The symbiote’s next words were directed at Lang. EDDIE IS OUR RIDE AND OUR HOME

HE KEEPS US FROM OVEREATING OR EATING WHO WE SHOULDN’T

WE KEEP HIM FROM DYING

CONVINCE HIM TO BE AN AVENGER

Lang grinned. “All righty.”

“You’re excited…?” Eddie said to Lang, feeling confused. He was confused at all of this. 

“Yes, but only because it’s not my job. Stark, you want to swapsies?” Scott got out of his seat, the movement accompanied by the typical screech of leather on the seat material. A good-looking man in his mid- to late- forties took the seat instead. He was no taller than Eddie, which was nice, though the journalist had no earthly idea when _Tony Stark_ had entered the quinjet. Speaking of which…

“So, where are we flying?” Eddie asked, stalling as he got rid of the journalist fanboy inside his soul, who was screaming about meeting Tony Stark on a private jet. Stark looked him up and down. Like everyone else who had ever done that to Eddie, he didn’t seem impressed by what he saw.

“Oh, scenic route to Oakland,” Stark said. “I’m checking in with the Wakandan Outreach Center. ‘s a good excuse to be in this part of the country anyway. Now, Mister Brock… Ed? Edward, Eddie, Alan, Al, Charles, Chuck—”

“Eddie is fine.” The list had been a power play, showing off that Stark knew both of his middle names and probably knew far more than he was letting on about Eddie’s history.

“Eddie, then. So your alien likes the idea of being an Avenger, but you don’t. I’ve got that right?”

“I… just don’t think planned brawls are a good idea for us,” Eddie said. “And I’m—I was, a journalist. Taking orders and being told what to do or what to think doesn’t work out for me.” 

“Yeah, I saw a confiscated tape of your interview with Drake. I get it. Bad team player, the works. So, why no brawling?”

“People die.”

“The right people?”

Eddie stared at him in shock before remembering Stark’s extensive history in weapons design. “…yes, most of the time. But I’m not in control and if—”

“You seen anybody about your need to be in control?” Stark asked, pulling a beanbag out of his pocket and beginning to toss it from hand to hand.

“No. It’s not a need, or a problem, it’s just—”

“But you worry about it.” Stark pulled out a second beanbag and started juggling. Badly.

“Because I don’t want to know what humans taste like!” 

“Seems like a conversation you should be having with your partner.” Stark noted Eddie’s expression, caught somewhere between disorientation and anger. “Your other? Alien? Love—”

“Maybe it is,” Eddie interrupted, before Stark could get any further down the garden path of nicknames. “But right now, we’re talking about the Avengers. Unless you’d rather recommend therapists?”

“Mental health is an automatic signup bonus to the Avengers’ benefits packet,” Stark said, without a trace of mockery. “Hawkeye flat out bought a farm and does equine therapy every damn day.”

“Mad at you?” Eddie faintly remembered Hawkeye being on the ‘wrong side’ or at least the ‘captured side’ of the Civil War Lang had described.

“Oh yeah. So, so mad.”

“But he likes me!” Lang cheered from the copilot’s seat. Eddie looked over at the ‘Ant-Man’ that was the closest thing he had to a friend right now, then back to Stark, who was still tossing and dropping beanbags. In the back of his mind, Venom was making snide comments about how they could juggle better than that and they’d never even tried. 

“Good for… Hawkeye. But—”

“And your lodging in San Francisco would be in the Richmond District.” Stark paused his ‘juggling’ for a second and handed him a phone. Pictures of a brightly lit and spacious room decorated the screen. As Eddie swiped, he found more pictures. “Ground floor, yard opens to Presidio, where I think you’ll find enough woods to suit your… symbiote.”

Eddie couldn’t stop staring at it. All the warning lights in the back of his mind flashed that they were trying to buy him off. That was all this was. A payout. But that didn’t make the house less real, or less potentially theirs. And God, he wanted this house.

“Rent…?” he asked.

“Rent free.”

Eddie looked up sharply. The illusion shattered into a thousand pieces. “Rent in exchange for assassination/cannibalism services and risk to life and limb, you mean.”

“I’m shooting straight with you, Brock.” Stark began expertly juggling the beanbags. The struggle had been for Eddie’s benefit, probably to make Stark seem more relatable as they talked. “Nothing’s free. But it’s the best deal you’re going to get, because of little factors like your face, Venom’s _or_ yours, being all over the news right now. Instead of fighting paparazzi every time you leave whatever hole in the wall you find, you can be anonymous. And be able to afford housing. Steve would insist I tell you something like ‘I’ll give you housing even if you _don’t_ help out,’ but that’s my foundation’s job, not mine. When Steve peaced out, he left me with a dearth of Avengers. Ugh, ‘dearth,’ and now Pepper’s teaching me words to talk about how few people I have.” Stark caught the beanbags, one in each hand. “So.”

“So, you’re telling me you’re understaffed, but you’re still not going to call on us very often out of respect for our… preferences.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Stark replied.

“Why hunt us down then?” Eddie asked. “You have to have better opportunities with those ‘dozens of people.’” 

“Honestly? Power. You’ve got power in spades and we’re without a Hulk, without a Thor, without even a Capsicle. And Pepper’s nagging me to give up the suits. Not that I’m going to, but… you know how it is with partners.”

The tactless statement burned like a cigarette end. “Yeah. I know how it is,” Eddie replied, rather than rise to the accidental jibe. 

“Exactly.” Tony began juggling again. “So? Can I count you in on Team Iron Man, for as many hours as you’re willing to give?”

“Still worried I’m going to be getting panicked phone calls at two a.m., saying a giant alien doughnut is flying down main street, or that I need to get to Wisconsin ASAP to stop some hoodlums stealing an old lady’s purse.”

“Absolutely not. Wisconsinites will be dealt with by a trained professional. You’re the backup. Available when you want to be, and guarding San Francisco when you don’t, assuming that’s where you want to stay. Lang’ll have a few more instructions, since somehow you and the tiny guy are buddies.”

“Hey, I’m the tall guy!” Lang chimed in. “He’s the tiny guy.”

“Depends on if we count in Venom,” Eddie replied, effectively demolishing the argument. Without Venom, he was 5’9 and not a centimeter over. Scott Lang was almost an inch over him and he could tell that the man would never let him forget it. With Venom, however, they could be anywhere from 6 feet, at minimum, to somewhere close to seven foot two. And, let’s face it, he generally wanted to be closer to 7’2, because it made looming over someone approximately twelve times easier. 

OUR HEIGHT IS A MORE STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE THAN THAT EDDIE

“My understanding is that this is a probationary period,” Eddie said, trying to drag the conversation back to a single, comprehensive page. He also shifted position so that Lang was being addressed just as much as Stark. “That if we don’t like it, or you don’t like us, that we can all go our separate ways with no harm done.” Probably no harm done. It depended on how many times they were called out and how many people Venom might bite the heads off of. 

“Agreed,” Lang said. “I promise, I’m going to be best boss you ever had. Friendliest team in the world, unspookable, and Bring Your Daughter to Work one day a week. And if I have to fire you, we’ll go out and get Mango Fruit Blast’ed.”

“The… what?”

“Sorry, reference to firing at my last job, which sucked. Majorly sucked.” 

Eddie didn’t have a baseline for whatever the hell Lang was talking about, so he let it slide. 

“Probationary sounds better than permanent,” the journalist said slowly. “When would all this start?”

“We’re beginning our descent,” Black Widow said. This was, apparently, the only answer he was going to get. Eddie felt the plane shift, though his stomach failed to shift with it. Venom muttered something about ‘landing being stupid/they could jump this far’. They probably could, but the idea didn’t sit well with Eddie. Flying didn’t sit terribly well with him. Falling had never been better.

Stark noticed his discomfort but politely glanced away. Spiderman attempted to cheer him up, twisting around in his seat.

“Don’t worry. I’ve never seen one of these crash before, Mr. Brock.”

“Thanks, kid, maybe don’t bring up the possibility that this’ll be the first time.” Eddie avoided looking out the window, working hard to convince himself that they were going down only in a controlled, planned way. They weren’t ‘going down’ going down. Besides, he had thought no height could frighten him after the ‘Jump’ instruction of the penthouse suite, and the redwood situation of Muir Woods. He seemed to end up in height-related situations more often than seemed statistically likely.

YOU SHOULD GET USED TO HEIGHTS

“Just because you like them,” Eddie muttered darkly. “And running and eating people doesn’t mean I have to. We’re very dissimilar sometimes.” 

WE BOTH LIKE FIGHTING OUR BOSSES

“Not in the Avengers. Our bosses would wipe the floor with us.”

The quinjet touched down more like a helicopter than a highly-advanced fighting machine. The street where they landed didn’t dent with their weight; the wings folding back delicately like a swan coming to rest and preen.

Stark got out first, gesturing grandly at the house in front of the quinjet. Eddie followed and stumbled at the uneven drop to the street from the vehicle. The housing models were the same up and down the street, without much room for diversity in a San Francisco planned neighborhood. Late November had already taken its toll on the neighborhood: barren acacia trees lined the street as well as empty-branched jacaranda. In the springtime, the street would be one of the prettiest flowering areas Eddie could imagine. Each house’s yard boasted several trees that shaded the yards with green clouds of leaves that hadn’t fallen away. 

TREES EDDIE

“Which one is ours?” Eddie said, half-expecting a ‘rowboat’ situation. A common comedy technique in fiction, people in need of a boat always thought that a gleaming, towering yacht was the boat they had hired… and then found themselves sailing out to sea in a dinghy with a possum living in the prow. Or in this case, living in a scorched-earth, former mobile home or something. 

To Eddie’s surprise, Stark pointed at a two-story house that seemed to fit in with all the others. Beyond the two trees in its front yard, he could see the forest towering behind it. Eddie left the group of Avengers to walk around the house and found that yes, the backyard opened directly into the Presidio area. The backyard had no fence and turned directly into a smattering of trees, which grew darker and darker the further one got into the woods. Eddie looked back at Stark, puzzled.

“The house property ends about 300 yards in,” Stark said, without prompting. “No one really wants it without the fence, because coyotes will wander out sometimes and other wildlife. Figured you wouldn’t be bothered by that.”

“No, uh, I can think of someone who would be excited to have a coyote in the yard,” Eddie said. Venom might only need the chemicals found in human physiology, but that had never stopped the symbiote from experimenting with eating other things. Like the badger. His stomach grumbled at the unpleasant memory and he stepped closer to the house. 

“You want to hand off the key?” he asked Stark. “I’ll warn you, I’ve lived in enough shitty apartments to know if you’re setting me up in a hastily-renovated drug den.”

Stark dropped the keys into his outstretched hand. “Security code is 1986, until you change it.”

“You’re letting me change it?”

“I _expect_ you to change it,” Stark replied as he moved out of Eddie’s line of sight and returned to the front of the house. “I change mine every three weeks, or whenever I get paranoid.”

“Doesn’t that irritate Pepper?” 

“Yeah. Yeah, it does,” Stark said, tone completely free of remorse. As it happened, Black Widow had already opened the door by the time they circled the house and Ant-Man had disabled the alarm. Stark coughed in mild embarrassment and said ‘welcome home’ as they stepped over the threshold. 

The interior of the house didn’t look like the pictures. It was bigger. Much bigger. It had clearly been designed as a dwelling place for an owner of several large dogs or, barring that, a wheelchair-bound family (hey, Eddie didn’t like the thought, but it was that big). How this house had been built in San Francisco was beyond his ability to imagine. 

“Stark, this is… this is _really_ big.”

“Well,” Stark had picked up a couple of oranges and was juggling again. “Aren’t you really big sometimes?”

“Not like—I mean, holy shit, Stark, was this place designed for the Hulk?”

“Funny story. No. It was originally built as an annex to Stark Tower, a West Coast version if you will. Somewhere we could have our D&D campaign with everyone involved.” Stark sighed and Eddie could hear in his voice that this was only half a joke. The D&D, well, that was probably a joke, but the West Coast annex of Stark Tower sounded plausible. And when the ‘Civil War’ Spiderman and Lang had talked about happened, the dream of the Avengers all coexisting peacefully for several hours… must’ve died. 

“So, how many bedrooms?” Eddie asked, trying to sound like a prospective homebuyer.

“Visible most of the time? Four.”

“Stark, we can’t live by ourselves in a four-bedroom house—”

“But twelve, if you count the breakaway rooms or the medical bay.” 

“…there’s a medical bay?” Against his better judgment, a part of Eddie perked up. This was mostly the part that had experienced the chaos of a warzone before and the part of him that remembered getting harpooned by Riot.

“Along with an override security code and door for the medical bay. The goal is that you call someone if you or anyone else gets injured.”

WE _ARE_ BATMAN, Venom said, seeming to marvel at the thought. The symbiote had said this aloud, so Stark’s look of surprise was validating.

“You giving it pep talks, Eddie?” Stark asked.

“Not about being Batman,” Eddie replied. He stood in the furnished living room, noting the lack of glass tables, breakable vases, or too many things that would be broken if they were flipped over. At least two bathrooms were on this first floor and, as he heard a toilet flush, there must be at least one more upstairs. Too big, the back of his mind shrieked. Other people deserved a house in the—

“Eddie.” Stark put a hand on his shoulder and Eddie didn’t shove it away. People liked doing this to prove they were ‘serious.’ He’d learned to just let it happen. “You’re doing me a favor by looking after the place. Yeah, you need a place to live and I can help, but it is insanely tricky to keep an eye on a house from out of state. A house that people would love to break into.”

“Do you know what the homeless crisis is like in San Francisco?” Eddie felt the familiar dregs of anger building inside of him. There were so many people who could be living in this house and instead Stark wanted him to—

“Do you know how few resources for housing the Avengers have? People like the kid have identities they need to keep secret. Say he—” Stark assessed Eddie’s expression. “Okay, say _Scott_ falls off a building. Yeah, I can fly, Rhodes can fly, but where are we carrying him? We’re not gods, or magical, or limitless. Hospital’s not an option. Never mind that people will kick the shit out of a downed super, if they’re the wrong kind of people.”

“House monitor, then.” Eddie could see the shape of the role Stark was describing. “You want me to make sure the house is available to the Avengers.”

“And work this job with Scott and keep an eye on San Francisco,” Stark added. “You’ll be busy, but it sounds like busy is good for you.”

IT IS EDDIE

BUSY IS BETTER FOR US

“You need to write down what you expect from us,” Eddie said. He’d had too much experience as a freelancer to promise anything that hadn’t been written and countersigned. Stark nodded and held out an envelope that had ‘Housecare’ handwritten on the front. 

“This is the full contract, along with baseline expectations,” Stark said. “Honestly, most of it is instructions for how to do homeowner things that I never have to do. First thirty days, you’re on probation with Scott and you can live here, regardless of whether or not you’re good with this as a permanent position. If you want to stay, you just sign the contract portion at the bottom at the end of the thirty days and give it to Scott whenever you see him. The Avengers’ probation will be longer.” Stark lowered his voice. “Between you and me, I’ve already decided the kid’s an Avenger, but he didn’t want it last time I offered it. So, the probation period’s a little longer now than it used to be.”

“That’s fine,” Eddie said. The envelope contained at least thirty pages worth of information. Clearly, Stark’s fiancé, Pepper, had put this together.

Both of them turned as Spiderman came down the stairs via the ceiling, sticking effortlessly to the white surface before landing, feet first, on the counter. Stark and Eddie watched, bemused, at least until Venom muttered in the back of Eddie’s mind: WE CAN DO THAT

“I know we can,” Eddie said quietly. “We just don’t get to watch us do it.”

SAN FRANCISCO HAS A LOT OF MIRRORED BUILDINGS

“I know.”

THIS WILL BE FUN EDDIE

YOU SHOULD BE EXCITED

Eddie had been trying to remind himself of the same thing. This big house, the Avengers, Lang’s involvement. It was going to be fun, going to be exciting. Going to be _better_. It had to be.

“I know.”


	8. And killing things is not so hard, it’s hurting that’s the hardest part

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **This is not the last chapter.**
> 
> It got… way too long and could qualify as its own fic by the time I’m actually done. Namely because I got really excited about things? That… there isn’t really buildup for? But I also got stuck thinking about the Snap and, while the internet imagines either Eddie or Venom disappearing tragically, I’d rather think about both surviving.
> 
> No longer canon compliant, because, um. I have no idea what’s going to happen in Endgame. January is also being extremely busy for the next two weeks at work, so I may not get back to this. The next chapter SHOULD be the final one. 
> 
> Also, I can only write for avoidant people, apparently. They say write what you know! (….yeah, that’s not what’s happening)
> 
> But you know what? YOU ALL are freaking FANTASTIC and I really really appreciate your time and kudos and bookmarks and comments. Seriously. 
> 
> Chapter title is from ‘Trout Shaped Replica’ by Amanda Palmer.

In the next four months, the world changed. If the house had felt large before, it felt colossal when half the world dissolved into ash. Eddie had lost half the neighbors he was beginning to know, which wasn’t as nice as some people might have thought it would be. He’d always been friendly. It came with the journalism bit, walking the beat, getting to know the people who surrounded and impacted your world, and be known by them. In stark contrast to his urban home, the house in the Presidio felt isolated. He didn’t walk past anyone but neighbors on the way home, so he made friends with neighbors. In some ways, his friendliness paid off after the Snap. Eight hours didn’t go by anymore without someone ringing his doorbell, asking if they could just come in and – this was where they would get shame-faced, avoid eye contact – ‘be near someone’. 

He had no doubt that some of them wouldn’t come back if he didn’t open the door, let them in off the porch. Besides, since Lang’s company had taken a serious hit with the catastrophe, both work-wise and staff-wise, Eddie was usually home to let them in. The constant visitors, each struggling through their own grief, distracted him from thinking about anyone he had lost. And most of them didn’t think he’d lost anyone at all.

“Such a nice young man,” Mrs. Valdez said, having brought her own mug of coffee over from her house next door. The 71-year-old widow came over every day around three in the afternoon to watch NCIS ‘with’ Eddie. “It’s a shame you can’t find a job. How is your medical program?”

Eddie looked up from his laptop and had to think for a second. “I don’t think anyone will bring me on as a paramedic anytime soon, but I’m passing the EMT coursework.” 

Sharp eyes flickered over to him, then returned to her mug. “They’ll always be looking for healthcare workers these days, Edward. I think they’ll overlook some lack of experience.”

Eddie bit back his retort that ‘they,’ meaning the entire human race, had been cut in half and that people to care for had decreased as well, so why should they cut corners. He couldn’t explain why he was really taking the online coursework anyway. 

“I’m sure something will work out,” he said instead. “And until Dave gets everything figured out legally at X-Con, I’ve got more than enough time to keep studying. So I’ll just keep doing that.” At all hours, drinking excessive amounts of coffee. 

Mrs. Valdez had begun glancing at the screen, returned from commercials, but remained more than capable of multi-tasking. “Still no sign of your employer?”

“I…” Eddie didn’t know how to say that the X-Con team had quietly given up on Scott when it had been more than two months and they had no verification of what had happened to him – or the entire Pym family. “No.”

If they were going to discuss the dead, he wouldn’t get any studying done. He unplugged the laptop and stretched. “I’ll be in the kitchen, making more coffee for Ashton. There’s still biscuits in the cupboard, if you get hungry. Just let me know if you need anything.”

Biscuits. When the hell had he become the kind of guy who had biscuits in the house? Well, technically because Stark. The billionaire had set up drones to drop off ‘welcome wagon’ foods and had forgotten to stop them when the kid… didn’t come back.

So that was where the biscuits came from. Mrs. Valdez had lost her husband and the two grandchildren they were raising in the Snap (as everyone called it). Eddie didn’t know how to advise her to move forward, other than recommending the surplus of cookies he had on hand.

WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO MOVE FORWARD

And then there was Venom, who was irritable at Eddie’s avoiding the real impact the Snap had had on them. It wasn’t just that Scott had dropped off the face of the earth, or Luis had vanished in the middle of one of his famous stories, or that Kurt was no longer a familiar presence in the corner, his tattooed hands drumming away on his laptop. Anne was gone. 

Eddie had found out only when her photo vanished from her pro bono law firm’s website and replaced with a ‘tragically, we lost Anne Weyling in the…’ popup message. He’d wanted to get drunk, after that, but couldn’t find the energy to leave the house and buy alcohol. The same night, Mark and Joanna who lived down the street had knocked on his door to see if he had any spare gas. The gas station around the corner had lost three staff members in the Snap and hadn’t managed to repair the family-run business. He hadn’t had any gas, but had let them in anyway. The young couple hung around until after three a.m., at which time Eddie fell into bed. He woke up to find them asleep on his couch. 

Most nights, the symbiotic pair went out patrolling San Francisco as Venom. At least one half of them could feel alive, in those cases. Other nights, Eddie felt worse than he had before he’d met Venom and wouldn’t get out of bed. Like when he lost Anne. It all came back to her.

“We don’t need to move forward,” Eddie said quietly, brewing another pot of coffee for the Lynden twin, who would be here any minute and lived on coffee. “The Avengers will figure this out without our help.”

WE ARE THE AVENGERS

“If they need us, they’ll call for us.” Having finished the coffee, Eddie took a notebook out of the cupboard and brushed away the grounds that had accumulated on its pages. “In the meantime, we need to visit the Mission District tonight and deal with those thieves.”

Because that was one of the main repercussions of the Snap. People mourned their families and friends and lost potential relationships. Other people stole what remained. Other people did both, or claimed one led to the other. San Francisco could no longer claim that Oakland, across the Bay, was the main source of all the crime in the area. San Francisco’s crime well and truly belonged to San Francisco residents, many of which had met Venom at this point. 

Eddie plotted their path tonight as if preparing to navigate a boat through unfamiliar and treacherous waters. 

When he next looked up from the notepad, the Lynden twin had arrived and busied themselves filling a thermos with coffee. The twin had lost their twin, as well as their mother, in the Snap. Eddie’s house was slowly and surely becoming their second home. He wasn’t sure he was altogether comfortable with their appearing at all hours of the day or night, because they hadn’t _actually_ said they were over the age of eighteen, but they hadn’t spent the night here yet either. And home appeared to be worse. He needed to have another talk with their father. Maybe as Venom. He wished the kid were here – Spiderman would have been close to them in age. The two of them could’ve laughed at memes or something.

“You not sticking around, Ashton?” Eddie asked, gesturing at the thermos. Ashton wrapped their sleeve-coated hands around the container, which tended to expel heat once full of hot liquid, and shook their head, brown bangs swishing back and forth.

“You gotta head out soon, right?” they asked by way of reply. “Long as your wifi works, I’ll hang around here. Just need more than a mug.” 

“Well, you know where the router is, if you run into any trouble,” Eddie replied, draining the last of the cold coffee in his mug. Internet had been a problem as much as anything else, since the telecom companies had all lost about half their staff and flat-out refused to work together or share resources. On the other hand, the utility companies had banded together, literally, to make sure power was either on in a neighborhood or provided carefully-monitored stipends to hotels with power so people could use a ‘hot shower’ system. Since fewer people existed to use the hotels at all, everyone was trying to do anything that would get them out of the red. Stipends were a good way to go. 

“You really just run around, getting shot at all night?” Ashton asked, moving to raid the creamer inventory Eddie had begun keeping in the fridge. 

“I do not get shot at all night.” Eddie checked his pinging phone (which had been restored to him months ago and tended to defy all telecom drama, more than half the time). A text from an unknown number. **Hi Eddie. I’m in the area**

 **who is this?** Eddie texted back.

“Yeah, sometimes you get shot,” Ashton said. The words should have been a joke, yet their tone went flat at the end. “We all got worried, that time you didn’t open your door for two days.”

“I told you, I was travelling for work,” Eddie said. “They wanted me to get some special training.”

No one had believed that, because it wasn’t strictly true. He’d underestimated how curious they were as to what he actually did. None of them bought the lie that he could afford this house and be friends with Tony Stark by working in an ex-con-owned security company, even after said company went on hiatus.

With all the free time (and the automatic depressive spiral that followed), Eddie had realized he needed medical training. Like, a lot of it. He was playing host (ha ha) to too many people here and participating in way too many hazardous situations to have people bleed out on his watch. He’d thrown himself into learning Occupational First Aid, Wilderness First Aid, anything with an online program or two to three days of in-person coursework (which was why he’d been away for two days). The Avengers didn’t have a medical doctor on hand though Stark had waxed vaguely about one a couple of times. Eddie hoped they would never need him as a medic but… headology wasn’t his thing, combat wasn’t his thing, writing things down wasn’t in demand, and he had to be useful as something other than Venom, resident berserker. Hell, he woke up screaming most nights/days anyway. Why not become a medic and do something about the horrors?

YOU CANNOT REPAIR AN EATEN HEAD EDDIE, Venom reminded him. 

‘we’ve talked about this, it’s not about you,’ Eddie reminded his symbiote fiercely. ‘ _humans_ are _fragile_ ’

Ashton had finished their creamer-infused coffee and poured another. “Just be careful while you go out and… ‘run’ at night. There’s that big monster thing in the city.”

The unknown number pinged again. **Dan Lewis. We met in San Francisco. I was with Anne?**

“Don’t people call that one Venom?” Eddie asked aloud, his mind racing with the thought of Dan. It didn’t take too much guessing to discover where the doctor might have gotten his number but why now? What did he want? Half the world did seem to spend time in his house, why not Dan freaking Lewis?

“People decide too quickly what they want to call things,” Ashton replied, glancing in the general direction of the living room. “Nobody here can take you being dead, so I’m saying, don’t go mess with Venom.”

“Can do.” Eddie still didn’t know what to text Dan. His thumbs functioned independently of his mind, typing out a text to Dan that detailed the address of the house and a time after they would be back from patrol before he could stop them.

“V…” he hissed under his breath. Ashton raised a single eyebrow. 

“That might be a little too Guy Fawkes. And confusing.”

Eddie batted a hand at them, but they had known him long enough at this point not to take it personally. They stepped back with their thermos and headed into the living room, humming what Eddie faintly recognized as the 1812 Overture – the song V blew up Parliament to. Venom hit ‘send’ on the text before he could erase it. Damnit. 

“Ass.”

WE DECIDED HOW TO MOVE FORWARD, the symbiote said, their growl a mix of indignance and pride. Eddie checked the time on his phone for the dozenth time and spotted a message on the Avengers’ coded app that he had missed earlier. He tried to open it—and the internet died. From Ashton’s irritated grunt and Mrs. Valdez’s cry of dismay at missing a moment of NCIS, the communications had gone out entirely.

“Sorry!” he called into the main room. 

“Not your fault, love!” Mrs. Valdez called. “Dear Mr. Gibbs was just about to get shot, that’s all.”

“How coincidental,” Ashton deadpanned. “You hear that, Ed? Your spirit animal’s about to check out. Maybe it’s a sign.” Their voice had moved to the side of the room with the router and he could imagine they were already standing on a ledge of the entertainment center to fiddle with it. Thank God Stark invested in sturdy stuff. 

“I’m _not_ Gibbs, for the thousandth time, Ashton!” Eddie opened the door to the kitchen, grabbing his ‘work kit,’ which was 99% medical supplies and some supplies for restraining villains if he had to do that. With a sigh, he headed to the garage to get the bike, settling the phone into a deep pocket. Before the Snap, Stark had his replacement bike delivered by a team of Amazon drones. Pepper had told Stark he couldn’t deliver a 900lb bike that way so, of course, that’s exactly what he did. The Amazon CEO had taped a note to it that was half death threat, half admiration, and Eddie had found that Amazon would no longer deliver things to his house, other than to drop them on the roof. Fortunately that was sturdy too. 

Though it was seven thirty on a Friday evening, the streets of San Francisco were empty. Eddie made his way south and couldn’t help but think that he _used_ to enjoy driving. Now, the knowledge that he could get from his home in Presidio to the heart of San Jose in under thirty minutes chilled him. It was like teleporting around California; the equivalent of being able to get from Manhattan to Albany in under an hour. And nothing showed signs of changing back. It had been four weeks since his last contact with Stark, though Eddie had sent weekly text messages (telecom companies allowing) to keep him updated. Stupid shit, like the medical training he was taking this week. The blog he’d begun writing, long-hand, for typing up whenever the Internet could be used for stuff like blogs again (it centered around the repercussions of the Snap and he doubted anyone would want to read it. Maybe, if everything reversed, they would.) 

Early on, he’d asked if he should be doing something else, now that Scott had vanished. Stark hadn’t replied.

WHAT DOES DAN WANT

“I dunno,” Eddie said, his voice muffled through the helmet and under the roar of the motorcycle. Venom never had trouble hearing him. “Probably to talk about Anne.”

IT IS TOO LATE FOR THAT

“Can we just focus on the road then?” 

WE DON’T NEED TO

No, they didn’t. Dusk had begun to fall and, in the grey-blue smog of winter, all the lights stood out like beacons. They made good time – they couldn’t help but do that – and Eddie hid the bike in one of the rotating five spots they had to stash it. Venom took over. Downtown in the Mission District had always been a target-rich environment; it wasn’t like they had to go to Westlake or stake out Sycamore Street. They might find the main group they were looking for on Bryant St, stalking the outskirts of Folsom, or if they went to Palou Avenue just outside Hunter’s Point. Eddie didn’t particularly care about some people taking what no one wanted… but this particular group had organized. Took strategically, killed on the way. It was only a matter of time before the community fought back in an organized fashion. The area didn’t need any more all-out wars than it already had. 

They parked the motorcycle at the 16th St. Bart station. The Walgreens behind it had been raided for meds too many times to qualify as a pharmacy anymore, so they had left it here before. When someone who looked like Venom got off a bike, the locals of the parking lot knew better than to mess with it. That just left people ‘passing through’ who hadn’t tried anything yet vis a vie his motorcycle (smart). Venom made their way to the rooftop, from which they could get a good look at the darkened police station several blocks down. Weirdly enough, the churches here were all still operational and there were a _lot_ of them. People had to flock to something when they lost half their lives. Eddie remembered that feeling. 

But he better knew the area from a couple of visits to a dive bar, further down 12th. 

Venom took them in the other direction, gliding over more taquerias and yoga studios than seemed strictly necessary. Both of them had to keep their wits about them when they travelled this high in populated areas: the telephone lines were laser wires in the darkness, waiting to electrocute the hell out of vaulting symbiotes. They weren’t really in danger unless they caught on fire – but they’d learned that that Eddie might faint if they were shocked for too long. 

If Eddie had spent time learning their nighttime activities while living in New York, he might have been frustrated at San Francisco’s comparative limitations, the power lines and irregular buildings. He hadn’t. This was home. Home just happened to be a little differently shaped depending on where they were. They had _also_ learned that Venom was heavy enough to crash through some rooftops, so that was another point of caution.

The symbiote landed smoothly on the rooftop of the Park Endurance Complex, which was large enough to straddle two cities; partially in Oakland and partially in San Francisco proper. Probably why the imaginatively-named ‘Parkers’ had chosen it for a base. Everything came back here: what they dragged out of the Potrero Center, the Best Buy, even as far as the Costco. All they needed to achieve with this ‘house call’ was to put the fear of Venom into (at Eddie’s last count) 20 or 30 individuals. Not an overwhelming number, but the group had been productive over the past three weeks. The first two murders had happened two days ago. Based on what little information had been available to the press, the murders had taken place at the beginning of the break-ins, rather than committed accidentally in the event. 

Venom slipped down the unguarded side of the building, sticking effortlessly to the vertical brick surface. Eddie tried not to look down. 

They put one foot on the torn-up carpet inside the upper story window. Immediately, they heard several inquisitive dog noises from inside the darkened room. Eddie whipped through his options for a moment before realizing they were across the street from the SPCA. Shit. The Parkers must have decided to ‘loot’ that too. 

‘dogs,’ he told Venom.

SO

‘they’re going to attack us what do you mean _so_ ’

To his surprise, the symbiote reached out with one hand and touched the head of one of the dogs. Certain that he was about to watch the symbiote destroy the dog in typical Venom fashion, Eddie tried to withdraw their hand. 

‘we are not killing them!’

DON’T BE STUPID

There were at least six other dogs, making curious noises. Chew toys of all varieties were scattered around the floor, along with some unused dog beds. Thanks to their shape-shifting form, Venom could effectively pet all the dogs at once and was doing so. Of course. Because what else did one do while hip-deep in enemy territory? 

WE WERE DESIGNED TO WORK WITH ALL SPECIES

‘yeah I still don’t get how you can say that… and you remember the dog in the hospital that didn’t like you. what about that one?’

WE HAD NO TIME TO SPARE THEN

‘and we do now?!’

Venom stopped petting the dogs. It didn’t appear to be due to the conversation, and not due to any lack of interest from the dogs in investigating their new friend. The symbiote stole to the door of the room and slipped out through the ajar portion, entering still more darkness. Judging by the placement of shadows, Eddie realized they had been standing in a disused yoga room. They had stepped out into a still-dark but glaringly white-walled hallway. Given a choice of two dark corridors, they went right. The dogs nudged out after them and Venom gave them all one final pat. With the dark suggestion of wagging stubby tails and a very intent way of moving, the canines dispersed to the left corridor. Dread rose in the back of Eddie’s mind at realizing the dogs were even bigger than he had thought.

‘going all disney princess on me V,’ he joked.

#$%@ YOU

The banter helped take Eddie’s mind off the undeniable certainty that they would be killing people in less than twenty minutes. It hadn’t been his plan, he’d explained that to Venom a dozen times already. If the symbiote decided they were in too much danger though, the plan would be off. Once they had turned the corner and no one appeared in the hall, Venom tested the ceiling as a method of transportation. It creaked with distinct intent. They switched back to the floor. Not everything was meant to withstand 800lbs of traveling muscle. 

‘I take back the disney princess comment’

They reached the end of the second hall, finding a set of elevators on the corner to their right and a staircase to their left. Venom pulled a little away from their body, getting a look around and down the staircase. One floor down lay the reception area, guarded by one of the Parkers. The lights throughout the second floor were off, as the building likely didn’t have actual power, but the grumble of a mobile generator meant the first floor would be better lit. Not good enough that the guard could see them though. Venom hesitated, then began withdrawing from their form, leaving Eddie sitting under the poor cover of the second-floor wall – much to the host’s panic. 

“what the _hell_ ,” Eddie hissed. 

GET THE DOGS BACK

Eddie whispered: “I didn’t make friends with them, remember?” 

WHISTLE

CLICK

WHATEVER IT IS THAT HUMANS DO TO CALL DOGS

“And you can’t because?”

Venom snorted and Eddie, after picturing the anatomical challenges for a second, could see why. Razor-sharp teeth and an alarmingly long tongue didn’t mix. He sighed, while some part of him had started to hyperventilate at the idea of standing here while a bunch of dogs came and found them. 

THEY WON’T STAY HERE EDDIE

HURRY UP

Before he lost his nerve, Eddie whistled. Loudly, because he didn’t want to be standing here for ten minutes making terrified little noises and listening to Venom’s critique on something _they_ couldn’t even do without ventilating their five-foot-long tongue. The sound shrieked through the building and he heard the alarmed shout of the guard below, along with frantic gunfire peppering the second floor. Venom had yanked them to the ground as soon as Eddie was done with the single note, so the gunfire passed through the pillar and into the wall beyond. Geez, hopefully none of this guys’ friends were up here. Drywall wasn’t sufficient cover.

The journalist opened his eyes to find that the seven dogs had returned from the other end of the hall. Also, that they didn’t like him. He hissed at his other as he scrambled back against the wall, still trying to stay out of sight from the gunman below. His whisper sounded as frantic as the gunfire had been: “V? your dogs??”

THANK YOU EDDIE

The symbiote took over and motioned the dogs onward with some movements and head pats that Eddie got the feeling were more nuanced than they appeared and that he couldn’t replicate. One of them barked, coming to stand at the top of the stairs. The guard below groaned and asked the dog if ‘he had knocked some shit over.’ A stubby tail wagged in response. Eddie heard the guard sigh as the dog whimpered in joy and back moving down the stairs, followed en masse by the rest of the pack. The guard saw no threat in this, though he started complaining about ‘why had they all had to get out? Come on, adopting them was Nathan’s stupid idea—’ 

Venom took advantage of the situation to camouflage and move to the first floor, where they continued moving towards a better recon position. Most of the ‘Parkers’ (since they had spray painted it on the wall in the reception area, Eddie guessed he could keep calling them that) were out doing what they did best. Three more men, not including reception guy, were down here, guarding different exits. The dogs had ‘met up’ with each of them without triggering any suspicion of a threat, receiving pats and sometimes treats for their companionship. The whistle had been verbally dismissed as something metal falling over upstairs. In the light of the first-floor floodlights, Eddie could see that these were the kinds of dogs he wouldn’t attempt to pet on the street. Sure, pit bulls and rottweilers got a terrible reputation, but these dogs were those breeds _and_ had bite marks and blood dried on their muzzles besides.

The symbiotic pair had gotten into position directly across from the guard who was in position at the main doors. The shadows cloaked them, as they half-cloaked the guard, who had knelt to pet the joyful pit bull mix attempting to lick his face off.

Then, as if they knew all the necessary recon had been completed, all of the dogs began snarling. 

The sound sent a lead weight into Eddie’s stomach. Nothing good ever followed that sound. He had spent his fair share of booking it out of interviews gone wrong, accompanied by exactly those sounds, usually in combination with those breeds. The dogs came snapping at the guards and continued until the guards were herded into a corner of the room, nearly climbing on top of one another, calling names that they had probably decided on for the dogs but that the canines weren’t responding to. Meanwhile, Venom beamed, something in the air of a proud parent about the symbiote’s mannerisms. Eddie would argue it was the most pleased he had ever felt Venom to be. More pleased than _eating people_. Who knew, maybe Venom was the parental type. 

‘you realize that’s only part of their gang’

OF COURSE EDDIE

Now came the problem of what they were going to do with the part of the group that they had caught. The dogs were great, and none of the men had gotten a shot off. Most of them were too busy trying to avoid getting mauled and had dropped their guns in the confusion. 

Venom uncamouflaged. Several of the dogs began waving their stubby tails at the sight. The symbiote moved too fast to be seen, reappearing mere feet from the group to kick a final gun out of reach. Then, Eddie felt Venom switching with him again, leaving the host as dominant. They were… sticking to the plan?

“I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve brought you all here today,” Eddie started, trying to sound jovial. Or good-natured/firmly in control of the situation if jovial wasn’t an option. “I and my associate heard that you’ve been looting. And stealing and murdering, actually, but I’m guessing the looting is the only thing that applies to _all_ of you.”

The dogs had stopped snarling to allow him to speak, so the sound of one of the guards snorting echoed in the room. “You did all this to _lecture_ us, you—” and devolved into threats and cursing. The guard had imagination and had had practice, but it was no match for Eddie’s interview with Riot, minor league mobsters, or the early days with the Sin Eater in New York. 

Eddie waited until a break in the swearing before shooting back: “I ran an investigative reporting show. You really think I haven’t heard worse? And are you done?” 

“You aren’t gonna kill us. You have that fancy suit and all you’ve done with it is sneak in and walk around. Hell, I could do that. I could _use_ that.” The talkative guard appeared to be getting more and more enthusiastic about the idea. Some of his companions were familiar with Venom and visibly begging him to shut up. “You know what I’m going to do when we get out of here, Suit?”

The term Suit was directed at Eddie, not at Venom – which was better in the long run for the guard’s life signs. Eddie ignored him: “And we’ve decided that we’re evicting you. Since you’re all here, I have to assume none of you are the murdering type and we don’t really need to eat your faces.”

BECAUSE YOU SAID WE’D GET FOOD ON THE WAY HOME

Eddie continued, “We’ll even let you take the dogs. But if we find you’ve been using them as attack units, just remember we can control them even better than you.”

CAN WE HAVE ONE THOUGH

“And believe me when I say we can eat you, your dogs, and demolish anything else you would like to throw at us. And we will.”

“When I get loose, I’m gonna peel that piece of goop off you, along with your skin.” The guard said it like he had thought about it. And, in retrospect, like he had been watching carefully when Venom vanished. 

Eddie kept a placid expression. “Which means none of you will be staying here another five minutes. I’d _run_ out of this block if I were you. The only reason the community hasn’t been able to deal with you themselves is because you’ve been holed up in here for weeks. We’re here to change that. Give them a fighting chance.”

This was the riskiest part of the entire bluff. He needed the guards to believe that the entirety of the Mission District was going to be out there, waiting to take them on. Significant imagination not required; the group of thieves had easily pissed off more than half the District for breaking into non-shuttered businesses or threatening businesses already working at half-staff. If they refused to run, Venom could beat them up and throw them out of the building. He’d explained to the symbiote, in detail, that these men were probably not worth killing.

“You’re not listening, Suit.” Apparently, talkative guard had learned nothing from Eddie’s instructions. “I’m gonna chain you to a chair, tear that thing off you, and then use it to eat your face.”

“Oh please, that’s not even an original idea,” Eddie shot back. His hands trembled at the memory of Riot and Drake attempting to do exactly that but at least his voice didn’t shake. The dogs were snarling again. “V, get them out of here.”

Venom took over but hesitated for a long moment as Eddie forced himself to breathe normally. He had to get used to people suggesting shit like that. It hadn’t been an original idea for Riot and it wouldn’t be hard to imagine for anyone else. 

THAT’S WHAT YOU GET UPSET ABOUT, the symbiote asked, displaying an astonishing lack of tact. YOU WERE HARPOONED AND YOUR LEGS WERE BROKEN AND YOUR HEART RATE SOARS BECAUSE OF ONE SHITBAG COMMENT ABOUT CHAINS

‘humans y’know we don’t make sense’

Besides, the guard hadn’t threatened to turn him into a kebab or ram him at 40mph with a town car. 

YOU’RE AN IDIOT

‘can we just kick them out please’

The symbiote did so. They had saved the talkative guard for last and Eddie had a vague impression of the kinds of thoughts moving through their mind: break the guard’s leg, break his _legs_ , let the dog maul him, skin him and—

‘V if you kill him we are not getting food on the way home’

HE THREATENED YOU

HE THREATENED _US_

Venom towered over the angry guard, who was barely able to push himself up from the floor after the beating they had given him. The guard’s eye was swelling shut, his breathing strained from the cracked ribs. Venom leaned over him speculatively.

‘you can’t kill everyone who threaten us! and he was… he was _threatening_ , he has no ability to do that!’

Venom licked the guard’s face, which wasn’t a good sign. Eddie could feel the symbiote moving further and further away from conversation with him, into that higher level where they felt comfortable and justified in killing someone – then Venom brought themselves back down.

“Our host says not to kill you,” the symbiote said, sounding more grumpy about it than anything else. The guard squinted up at them and panted.

“T…toldja… y’wouldn’t do it…”

“We could throw you out of the building. We wouldn’t be killing you. The wet smack of your human body on the concrete would. We’ve had the opportunity to study human insides, ribs, lungs, skin…” The symbiote licked their lips in anticipation and echoed what Eddie had said earlier. “ _Humans_ are _fragile_.”

The guard paled, finally. “Please don’t do that.”

‘Venom that’s worse than the threat he made,’ Eddie said in exasperation. ‘please just move him outside so his friends can get him and they’ll all run away. _no throwing_ ’

“You owe your life to our host,” the symbiote said pleasantly to the guard, before grabbing one of his legs.

They dumped him some blocks outside the Park Endurance Complex, then Venom did something complicated that made the only remaining dog race off into the blackness to find the guard’s fleeing companions. The symbiotic pair then returned to the Complex, where Venom barricaded the front door with a nearby abandoned truck… and then another one. Even here in the middle of an urban area, it was too dangerous to intentionally burn out or blow up a building in California. 

Their next responsibility required waiting on the roof of the Complex until the rest of the thieves came back. The ‘Parkers’ hadn’t all been in the same location, so first Venom and Eddie dealt with a group of nine, then another group of eight, and settled in to wait for the final group to return. It took them three hours – long enough that Eddie wondered if the groups they had thrown out had decided to warn everyone else. If the others didn’t agree with the murdering, it was a good bet that they were trying to find somewhere to hole up, rather than launching another attack. With the exception of the talkative guard, and a half dozen other people who thought being sassy at Venom was a good idea, no one had tried to fight them much. 

Finally, the final group of seven returned. Viewing their positions from the roof qualified as a masterclass in group dynamics. It took just seconds to identify the cocky-looking man travelling in front as the usual murderer. Not their leader; he travelled towards the rear of the convey carrying stolen goods, but the cocky man had his own two groupies. Everyone else in the group gave him a wide berth.

‘in and out okay?’ Eddie reminded Venom. The symbiote growled in acknowledgment. It felt like a long night to both of them when spread out like this. Little to no killing and long stretches of empty time. Privately, Eddie suspected Venom missed the dogs. 

The long stretch of empty time ended when Venom dropped like a stone onto the murderer. His groupies shied away, gunfire tracing up and down the symbiotic pair’s back as they… took care of him. It had been unrealistic to expect Venom not to kill anyone, so Eddie bit back any comments he wanted to make. It was only one. One out of 29 thieves, at last count. The symbiote straightened to their full height, which put them over the heads of most of the humans. They smiled.

Eddie knew from the rush of joy in Venom’s emotions that it was not a nice smile.

#

After routing the ‘Parkers’ from their hiding place (+1 fatality), the symbiotic pair headed back to where they had left the motorcycle, keeping mostly to the rooftops to avoid any chance encounters with decamped Parkers. Ordinarily this would keep them from getting into any more fights but Venom stopped altogether when they heard unusual shouts. The background in any major city always had some shouting going on in the background, sure. This was outdoor, demanding shouts; the kind of noise that said someone was being robbed or potentially murdered, probably at a place of business.

They leapt off of the roof of an old chocolate factory and transitioned to the wall of one of the brick churches, keeping out of the streetlights to get a better view of events below. From there, they could see the wooden and concrete awning of a nearby taqueria. A group of rambunctious young men, not much older than Ashton, were attempting to threaten their way into a free meal. 

YOU SAID WE COULD GET FOOD, Venom reminded him. 

‘okay…’ Eddie did want tacos and it sucked to watch a crime in process and do nothing about it. He’d had to do that too many times as a journalist. Venom moved forward on the church’s wall, camouflaged and unnoticed by the arguing group. In the deep shadows cast by overhead fluorescents, the group of four had pulled back from their friend with the gun, much as the group of looters had earlier from the murderer, trying to avoid the suggestion of being associated with lethal force. They were trying to simultaneously talk their friend out of it and explain to the livid, frightened owners that they should do ‘what was good for them.’ The walk-up counter didn’t look bullet-proof and Eddie felt his heart sink, even as Venom’s smile grew. The operators might have guns too. Their actions earlier might have been excusable, at least in his mind, but no one needed or deserved to die here over tacos. 

Venom dropped on the gun-holder from the rafters, moving quickly enough that their weight had no chance of snapping the beams. The punk dropped him, coughing and cursing at Venom’s weight (part of it – they didn’t want to crush him entirely). Five other safeties clicked off – the men behind the counter did have guns – as Venom lowered their head to hover, tooth-filled and open, over the young man’s head. 

“You want tacosssssss?” the symbiote asked in what Eddie recognized as their ‘depraved’ tone. Their potential snack had not moved, not even to get his hands up and shield himself. His eyes were so wide Eddie could see Venom reflected in them. “We also want tacos.”

The man whimpered, ever so slightly. Someone fired at their back, the explosive sound enough to cause Eddie to whip their head round and snap “NOT NOW,” before returning to the task at hand. Venom licked the punk’s face – eugh, again? Eddie was going to taste that later.

“We’re cutting in line,” the symbiote announced. They then drop-kicked the punk across the parking lot, some thirty feet away. The symbiote looked back at the group of young men, grinning like a Cheshire. The smile turned sad when the young men bolted to the parking lot. They must have still been uncertain if Venom would be coming back for the drop-kicked friend, because the only effort of ‘help’ he received was two of them grabbing his arms and dragging him along until he could make it to his feet.

‘thanks for not killing him,’ Eddie said. Because this was progress, regardless of the licking.

“We’re getting mole,” Venom replied, referencing the spicy sauce Eddie had introduced them to… pretty much in hopes that this exact situation would take place. Chocolate had the same chemical the symbiote derived from eating people, therefore, so did mole. Thank God. The taqueria operators were yelling at them in Spanish and hadn’t yet put away the gun one of them held—was that a _shotgun_?

EDDIE IS THAT EVEN A GUN, Venom asked him, not asking out loud for once.

‘uh yeah it just… look, I’ll talk to them’

THEY’LL SHOOT YOU IDIOT

‘then keep the suit on and we’ll do it that way’ 

Eddie took a breath, steeling himself for a conversation and hoping neither of them would be in the mood to shoot him in the face. Venom drew back their face, which felt like surfacing from a bowl of Jello. Eddie put up both of their (terrifying) hands defensively and Venom got with the program, reducing them from the usual height of seven feet to Eddie’s actual height of 5’9.

“We just want to order,” Eddie said over their shocked silence. One of the two chefs looked after the escaped group of hoodlums, then back at Eddie. The shotgun the other man held came down, cautiously. Neither wore name tags.

“We take cash,” said the one with the gun. “No bartering.”

“Hey, hey, no I get it.” Eddie didn’t step forward yet, squinting at the menu over their head. “Can I get three chicken mole tacos and, ah, whatever you have that’s close to a vegetarian burrito?”

The one not holding the gun totaled the purchase on the cash machine and looked up expectantly. They performed a careful dance of Eddie moving forward to hand over the requested payment, receiving his change, and then retreating to wait as both men moved back into the kitchen to prepare the meal. It was probably the safest the taqueria owners had been all night, with Eddie and Venom waiting outside, but they doubtless didn’t feel that way. Eddie rubbed a hand over his face. God, it was only two a.m. and he felt tired. 

WE CAN GET US HOME

“No,” Eddie managed to avoid snapping the word. He tried not to sleep when riding along with Venom, not after last time. 

WE AREN’T GOING TO TAKE US ANYWHERE ELSE. A normal reaction would have been for Venom to sound hurt, instead the symbiote just sounded angry at Eddie’s lack of trust. WE HAVE A HOME NOW

BESIDES YOU WOULD FALL APART

“I would _not_!”

Both of the chefs looked up. The one who had been holding the shotgun reached towards it again where it lay on the countertop. Before grasping it, he looked keenly at Eddie’s face, then said something in Spanish to his companion. The other shrugged dismissively. Both relaxed slightly and went back to cooking.

YOU ALMOST FELL APART EARLIER

“For one second, I was slightly stressed. Are we going to hold that over my head for all time?”

IT’S NOT JUST THAT

WE STILL WATCH TV

“Yeah, I know.” The lights and sound from his laptop kept Eddie half-awake for hours until he would abruptly drift off. He had a sneaking suspicion Venom had something to do with the sudden attack of sleep when that happened, but nothing he could prove. “So?”

YOU FELT EMOTIONS

HUMANS HAVE TO PROCESS EMOTIONS

ALL THE PEOPLE YOU LET INTO OUR HOUSE ARE PROCESSING EMOTIONS

“Is that all you learned from TV?” Eddie chuckled. “We watch very different shows.”

YOU FEED ON THEIR EMOTIONS TO AVOID YOURS

“Uh huh…” he said, keeping his pace normal as he walked up to accept the prepared bags of meals the non-shotgun-wielding owner had placed on the counter for them. Both meals smelled fantastic. “That doesn’t sound like me.”

WHEN WE CALLED YOU A LOSER EDDIE IT WAS BECAUSE YOU RUN AWAY FROM THINGS

AND BECAUSE YOU ARE A LOSER

BUT MOSTLY BECAUSE YOU RUN AWAY

“Says the guy who literally hides inside my body?”

Venom seethed at that and didn’t say anything else as Eddie carried the bag back towards their bike, eating the vegetarian burrito on the way. Sure, he’d feel sick tomorrow with this and the mole taco extravaganza, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to eat something he enjoyed. The bag went into his backpack and Venom dove the scary little head part of themselves into the bag for dinner as Eddie started the bike. 

He couldn’t wait to get home and fall asleep. 

He had the nagging feeling he was forgetting something though. What could be all that pressing that it couldn’t wait for morning? 

Fifteen minutes later, he pulled into the driveway and saw all the lights still burning. A sigh forced its way out of his mouth – Ashton had probably waited for him to get back and he’d now have to stick around to make sure they got home. He took a step forward, pulling off his helmet. In the dark, he almost didn’t spot the unfamiliar collection of clothes by the door. It took a second to recognize it as a person, sitting propped up and asleep, at his front door. It could be anyone but – no, tall, model-looking doctors who were still in their white coats didn’t tend to come flinging themselves at his door. Dan had showed up earlier.

Wincing, he checked his phone to see how many texts he must have missed. The notification light flashed so quickly he felt surprised it hadn’t shorted out. He unlocked the phone just to swipe away the messages, but Tony Stark’s face was staring back at him.

He panicked, dropping the phone. Venom grabbed it as Stark began talking.

“Brock, where the hell have you—why am I looking at the sky, Brock.”

“D-dropped you.” Eddie recovered quickly from the shock and reclaimed the phone. “And I was patrolling. It’s always a little weird for people to see Venom with a cell phone so—”

“Love to talk, but we’re actually heading your way.” Eddie recognized now that the strangeness of the view was because it came from inside Stark’s helmet. No background, just a Facetime-style view of his face. Then his brain caught up with what they were saying.

“Is there a fight?” San Francisco was huge and he didn’t check the news on patrol, just knocked out the areas he’d previously decided upon and any other crimes that came up as they went. 

Stark disapproved. “For a journalist, you are way too out of touch, Brock.” 

“I’m a man of the people,” Eddie said, going for glib. 

“Aren’t you cohabitating with an alien that wanted to destroy the planet?”

Eddie had more than enough ‘venom’ to respond to that, mostly centering around ‘what’s left of the planet, you mean,’ but he bit back the words. “How can I help you, Tony?”

“Empty out that hostel you’re running. Then get some scrubs on. Any of those medic classes teach you a decent stitch?”

“Better than some.” 

“Good, because Widow wants to do some kind of surgery before she gets anything stitched up and she’s doing that Russian thing where you pretend you don’t know you’re going to pass out, so you might have to do try out your surgical skills.”

Eddie blanched at the thought. He could do stitches, bandaging, and generally stabilize people in crisis but surgery lay miles ahead of his comfort level. The closest he had been was a one-day crash course in emergency childbirth, which he’d almost failed. 

ABSURD WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT ALL THE OTHER GORE YOU’VE SEEN

What kind of doctor was Dr. Dan? Eddie found himself wondering as he approached the figure unconscious by his front door. He unlocked the door, hoping the doctor would wake himself up. But Dan didn’t wake, head on top of knees, white coat bunched up behind him. 

Next, Eddie spotted the recyclable bag next to Dan, a couple of unopened wine bottles poking through the top. He couldn’t smell wine in the air, so it was unlikely Dan had gotten drunk, come here to kick his ass, and… texted him beforehand, yeah, no. When Eddie opened the door, he found Ashton sitting on the hallway floor, facing the front entrance. Their face screamed alarm at the door opening, until Eddie stepped in. 

“Is the guy still there…?” they asked. 

“Yeah, he’s a friend,” Eddie said, then gestured back at the phone to communicate he was on a call. Then, remembering their earlier telecom issues, he gestured in the direction of the router and mouthed ‘thank you’ before stepping into the living room. At least Ashton was the only one who had hung around tonight. “Stark?”

“Sorry, am I interrupting your ‘me time’?” Stark asked. The words didn’t have a bite, other than what Eddie imagined, but he imagined quite well.

“I’m tracking,” Eddie said, resisting the urge to tidy pillows while on this phone call. “Widow bleeding. Hawkeye still AWOL...” Hawkeye had been AWOL since the Snap. “You bringing anyone else to this impromptu party?”

“War Machine, Nebula.”

“I don’t – who is Nebula?”

“Why is Nebula,” Stark quipped back, somewhat nonsensically. “Get behind the TV and push the far left upper corner of the entertainment center.”

Eddie glanced at the entertainment center and the TV, which had always felt precariously balanced to him on its swiveling metal bolt. “Yeah?”

“It won’t _break_ , Brock and if it does, I’ll buy another one!” Stark had officially gotten snappy. Eddie scootched behind the TV and fumbled with the corner as instructed. It gave as he pushed it and he heard Ashton yelp from the hallway. 

“Ash?!”

“You have _more rooms_!”

Should’ve seen that coming. “Perfectly normal!” he called back.

“No, it’s not, and please get rid of whoever that was,” Stark said firmly. 

“You said we’ve got twelve rooms and a medical bay. You have four people coming. That’s five rooms including me. They’ll go home when they’re ready and until then, Ashton won’t be in your way.” Was there anyone he was missing? Oh. Right. “And there might be a sixth person.”

As if on cue, he heard Dan’s voice from the porch and a somewhat timid knock on the open door. “Hello? Oh, hi, sorry,” this must be directed at Ashton in the main hall. “Sorry if I scared you earlier, I thought Eddie lived alone and he told me to come over and—”

“Just a minute!” Eddie called.

“And who’s THAT?” Stark demanded. “Why are you filling my house with people?”

If things went to shit, it was ‘Stark’s’ house all over again, as if Eddie could forget. Good to know that that standpoint would be their norm. 

“He’s a doctor,” Eddie said. He wondered if he could play it off that way when they showed up, being all ‘oh, of course I saw your communication earlier and I knew that I should have a doctor on hand.’ He still didn’t know what kind of doctor Dan _was_ , which kind of put a damper on that approach. “I’ll see you soon.”

He hung up the phone and turned to Dan, who stood in the entryway looking sheepish, bag of wine bottles in hand. Scratch that, the doctor looked like shit. 

“Sorry, I showed up early and…” Dan looked over his shoulder at the main hallway. “I think I made your friend leave.”

“They should be in bed anyway.” Eddie took a long look at the bag of wine bottles, then at Dan’s face. “Going out on a limb here, but this is about Anne, right?” 

Dan’s face closed off, a self-defense mechanism snapping shut, then he appeared to remember that this was why he had come. 

“Yeah,” the doctor said, setting the wine bag down on the couch. He then fidgeted with his hands. “I’m surprised you’re doing so well, actually. I mean, I mean that in the best possible way, I’m _glad_ \--”

“Yeah well, Anne left me a long time ago now,” Eddie lied. “Sorry I never reached out to say… y’know.”

“I…” Dan’s face went through a complicated series of emotions. “I didn’t mean doing well in general. I meant today… I guess, maybe it doesn’t matter. Like you said, it was a long time ago for you two.” The doctor choked out a laugh and Eddie couldn’t kick him out now. Not for the Avengers, not for all the neighbors combined. 

“Dan, buddy?”

“Yeah?”

“We are going to talk. I will promise you that. And we’re going to make our way through that wine.”

NO EDDIE

“We’re going to make our way through _some_ of that wine,” Eddie corrected himself. “But first, we’re going to have people storming in really soon and they’re going to need medical care.”

Dan looked distracted. “Wait, when you corrected yourself— do you still have the Venom creature living in your—”

“Dan. It’s important.” 

The doctor straightened. Adopted a professional expression. “Yes.”

“What kind of doctor are you.”

“Radiologist.”

Shit. “You stare at X-rays all day.”

“I diagnose physical issues from X-rays,” Dan said, with only a trace of offense. “Which requires medical school, and I originally specialized in general practice, as recently as the last ten years. So, whatever the issue is, I can help.”


	9. I'm not the killing type, I'm not, I'm not

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, everyone. January has been chaos. 
> 
> Also, since it seems polite to warn people, there is blood and surgery in this chapter. Sorry about that and please forgive my significant lack of medical knowledge. 
> 
> And I apologize for Tony being on edge. It’s hard not to make him a bit of a jerk, since he just has so much power due to his position, intelligence and arrogance. Things should improve for him by the next (probably final!) chapter. Seriously. 
> 
> Also? You’re all terrific. Thanks for joining me on this continuing journey that is kind of a departure from the first segment of the fic. I… just want to make sure Eddie’s okay. Because throwing someone in housing without a community or support system (symbiote notwithstanding) doesn’t necessarily mean they’re okay. 
> 
> This chapter is brought to you by the majority of my weekend, and mostly NiER soundtracks. I haven’t played NiER (probably won’t), but the music is a damn masterpiece. 
> 
> Chapter title is from ‘The Killing Type’ by Amanda Palmer. Heh, I realized that I’ve already used the same song once, but Runs in the Family is such a badass song I’ll allow it.

Dan wanted to see the medical bay immediately. Eddie understood – if he had known how to open the damn downstairs, he would have already explored it months ago. As things lay, he and Dan headed down into the spacious area beneath the house to explore. There had to be another exit down here, just for safety’s sake, which meant there was another entrance to the house. At that thought, an uncomfortable shiver went through Eddie’s body. 

WE ARE MORE DANGEROUS THAN ANY HOME INVADERS

BESIDES EDDIE WE’VE SEEN WHERE YOU USED TO LIVE

YOUR SECURITY MEASURES AREN’T IMPRESSIVE

“Nobody cared who I was then,” Eddie hissed. Across the room, Dan stopped oohing and aahing over the technology available long enough to glance at him, a question in his eyes. Eddie looked away, so Dan went back to what he was doing – but paying more attention now.

“So does the alien keep you pretty busy?” the doctor asked. Using some kind of doctor-hacking ability Eddie wasn’t familiar with, Dan had already gotten into the medical bay’s computer system. Eddie lingered in the doorway, wishing Dan hadn’t started a conversation so Eddie could go look for the additional exit/entrance instead.

“We keep busy. Mostly keeping the peace post-Snap,” Eddie replied. 

“You’re getting along better with… it, then?”

“Sure.” He looked over his shoulder, back towards the other rooms. “Look, I’m just going to check the other rooms for wherever they’re going to enter.” There had to be a staircase or something, right? Eddie glanced around the medical bay and, despite its being spacious, a spreadsheet of tips for emergency services began running through his mind, beginning with not crowding the patient(s). 

“So,” Eddie began. “Do you want me to put people in another room or…?”

“It’s a big enough hallway, just herd them out there. Do you have an idea how many injuries we may be looking at?”

“One that I know of, a Russian who might want to do her own surgery. I feel like Stark is going to wait until she’s stable to announce he’s been stabbed or some stupid thing.”

If Dan was alarmed at these announcements, he didn’t let it show on his face. “This is a nice neighborhood. Are any of your neighbors surgeons?” 

“No. We’ve got an endodontist and a pediatrician.” God, it was bizarre that he knew that. And that he knew they had had a neurological surgeon prior to the Snap – Cameron Quan, who had lived alone at the end of the street. Eddie saw her a grand total of three times; that was how in-demand she had been.

Dan appeared to be running through his other options. Eddie hesitated, wondering if he should mention the medical training he’d been amassing.

Venom decided it was important.

“WE HAVE TRAINING IN EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES AS WELL.”

Eddie shut his mouth with a snap as Dan looked up. The journalist felt his shoulders tighten with embarrassment. The hell, he didn’t have surgical knowledge and that was what Dan needed—

“Can you suture yet?” Dan asked. Astonishingly, the doctor looked like he was actually considering the comment to be useful. 

“A week-long training a couple of months ago and a lot of practice on fruit since,” Eddie replied. “Still not great at selecting suture sizes or composition.” 

“That’s good though. Thanks for telling me,” Dan said, looking back down at the computer. When he glanced up again and noticed Eddie not moving, he waved the journalist off.

“Sorry, yeah, find the door,” Dan told him, returning to the computer screen. “It looks like Stark is sending over the medical records now. Oh, yikes, all the medical records.”

“Isn’t that a huge HIPAA violation?” Eddie asked.

“I’m pretending they all just finished signing Releases of Information for exactly this situation,” Dan said brightly… then sighed, returning to the screen. As Eddie left, he just barely heard the doctor mutter: ‘it’s like working wizards to muggles, good God.’

Unsure if that was directed at him and suspecting it was directed at the Avengers’ total ignorance of health privacy laws, Eddie went looking for the door.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT

“We should know about all entrances and exits.”

WHY

DO YOU FEAR TONY STARK

Eddie could feel Venom shuffling at the back of his mind then, checking… well, checking glands and chemical levels and whatnot. Eddie hadn’t studied psychology or neurochemicals much, so he probably knew less about the brain’s functioning patterns than Venom did. Researching the brain would raise too many questions or worse, provide too many answers as to why Eddie was perfectly happy cohabitating with a symbiote. 

Venom finished their assessment.

YOU DON’T FEAR STARK

“Nope,” Eddie replied. While Venom had been ‘checking,’ Eddie had found a locked door at the dark end of a twist in the hallway. A couple of nearly-invisible cameras watched him from strategic corners, not so much as a red light to betray their presence. Eddie squinted at the doorway, noting the keypad next to the traditional ‘key in lock’ style doorknob. 

“V, can you—”

A black tendril advanced to explore the doorframe and found it too tight to slip through at any point. Instead, the tendril ducked to go through the doorknob which, to Eddie’s surprise, still took them a minute to navigate. He was becoming concerned that he would have to explain the predicament to Stark (‘um, yeah, my symbiote got stuck in your door?’) when the tendril finally reemerged.

“Thank you,” Eddie said, both for embarking on the adventure of lock navigation and for saving him an explanation to Stark.

IT’S A STAIRCASE LEADING TO ANOTHER LOCKED DOOR, Venom told him. AND THE AVENGERS ARE HERE

Eddie backed away from the door and had to remind himself, strangely, that he lived in a house owned by Tony Stark, who had asked him to live here. That the Avengers had every right to be here and had told him they were coming. This was literally the point of why he was here.

YOU _ARE_ AFRAID OF STARK

The symbiote sounded deeply puzzled at the lack of logic. 

“Shut up,” Eddie muttered and headed back to tell Dan. Behind him, he could hear angry voices and quieter discussions underway, before the door to the stairway unlocked. Fortunately, he had already turned the corner and was out of sight.

YOU HAVE BEEN LETTING PEOPLE INTO THIS HOUSE FOR MONTHS

YOU JUST LET THE DOCTOR WHO CALLED US A PARASITE INTO THE HOUSE

“Technically, you did that,” Eddie said, striding towards the medical bay. Maybe he could pretend to be getting a gurney. What if they already had a gurney? He should’ve taken stock of what they had and what they needed – someone could be bleeding out on his—in the basement of Stark’s home and he had _walked away_. 

Dan looked up as Eddie entered the medical bay. “Are they here? I heard voices.”

Eddie nodded. Dan watched his face carefully for a few seconds before nodding, once. 

“You know how to get an IV started?” Dan asked. Eddie was suddenly relieved that that was the _only_ question he asked and nodded, quickly. 

“Yeah,” he replied. Of course, they’d need an IV. Dan had the medical records, they already had a theoretical diagnosis of (unknown) surgery from a (delirious?) Russian woman, and Eddie didn’t doubt they had the supplies to do just about anything, if not the knowhow to do anything. 

He headed out of the medical bay and found the small hallway full of people. 

Black Widow was on her feet and shouldn’t be. That was the first thing he noticed. She had a hand pressed just below her hip, which… well, which wasn’t where Eddie had been expecting her to be injured. He’d heard she was originally a spy. Spies got shot in the gut or the head (or, if tortured, probably in the kneecap); someone getting shot in the hip just didn’t make sense. A shoulder, even, if she was running away, but she didn’t strike Eddie as the kind of person who ran away from anyone.

Stark was still in the Iron Man suit, sans mask, and Eddie could hear a faint voice giving the billionaire increasingly angry-sounding instructions. That’d be fun to deal with later. War Machine, also sans helmet, was attempting to keep an eye on everyone in the group. The final member of the team was a blue and purple-skinned woman with black eyes (Nebula?) who was carrying twin swords. When Eddie came into view, War Machine was the first to spot him and the only one to smile in welcome.

“Thanks for keeping the porch light on.” 

“It’s motion-sensitive,” Eddie said, without thinking. The man who was War Machine hesitated a second, then coughed a laugh. 

“Well, then I hope we didn’t wake you up.”

Both of them turned their attention to Black Widow then, who was refusing all attempts at help and making slow, slow progress through the hall. A trail of blood followed her, having already soaked her side and dripping from her pant leg onto the tiled floor. The blue-purple skinned woman sheathed her swords and groaned in disgust.

“It’s just a stab wound, Widow. Surely you’ve had worse.”

“We can’t all be as dissembling as you, Nebula,” Black Widow said, tone even, as if the hand pressed to the wound in her thigh were simply an impediment. She didn’t put any weight on the leg that Eddie could see, which was the main thing affecting her stride and speed. Nebula gave up with a sigh and stepped forward to yank the other woman’s arm over her shoulders. She made no change in expression when Widow glared at her, the promise of a thousand deaths in her eyes.

“What is it you think you could do to me that no one else has?” Nebula asked, in answer to the unspoken threats.

“I’m not opposed to reprises,” Widow said. Her stance relaxed a little. Between them, they made it to the medical bay. Nebula turned her glare to Dan Lewis but Eddie had the impression this was just her general reaction to meeting new people, rather than anything against Dan specifically. 

“Have a seat,” Dan said, rather than demanding to know why she wasn’t already on a gurney. “We’ll get an IV started—”

“No painkillers,” Widow said, as Nebula eased her with surprising care onto one of the medical beds. “No sedatives.”

It contradicted the knowledge Eddie had been amassing, but it did make their lack of an anesthesiologist easier. He started prepping the IV to the given specifications, Dan giving him notes as he did so. 

“Any allergies?” Dan asked Widow, as if he didn’t have direct access to her medical records.

Widow smiled faintly, though the pressure of the hand on her hip increased. “Nothing new. No painkillers, no sedatives.”

“And I’ll be performing the surgery,” Nebula interrupted, directing the comment at both Dan. “So whoever you are, there’s no need for you.” 

WE LIKE HER

Venom had been keeping quiet until now so Eddie almost jumped at the comment. 

“I get the feeling she’s not exactly a hospital employee,” he said in a soft voice. Nebula heard him, glared at him, but didn’t say anything. Meanwhile, Widow had one-handedly cut away the sections of her uniform that would get in the way and Eddie had gotten the IV started. 

Dan tried to smooth the waters with Nebula. “No problem, you definitely know more about the injury and the patient than me. How can I help you?”

A look of confusion, of expecting an argument, passed across Nebula’s face. Then she looked down at what was fast becoming ‘her’ patient – and her patient was losing blood. 

“There are metal constructs in her hip. Those are primarily what’s damaged. I’m familiar with the technology and anatomy, so I’m reconnecting them. You make sure she doesn’t stop breathing, or lose too much blood, and you need to fix the muscles when I’m done.” Nebula spoke about breathing and blood, even muscles, as if it had been a long time since she had thought about them as part of her body. 

SHE IS TECHNORGANIC, Venom said. FRACTURED THROUGHOUT

“That’s not nice,” Eddie murmured. Nebula turned on him.

“And _you_ , muttering child, can shut up.”

“Eddie, I’m going to need help with the practical stitching,” Dan said. The doctor already had a real-time virtual diagram of Widow’s position on the medical bed, using some kind of scanner/bio-reader Eddie wasn’t familiar with. Whatever it was, it overlaid the bone structure, muscles, vascular system, and several other filters he didn’t recognize. Dan looked both excited and terrified that he wouldn’t be able to figure the complex piece of technology out in time. 

Eddie didn’t want to cost them any time, but he had an idea of what Dan meant by ‘practical stitching’ and knew he’d never practiced on internal tissue – or many live humans at all. He also couldn’t let the patient know that.

“Dan, I shouldn’t be—” He caught sight of Nebula about to begin the procedure and all thought of complaining went out of his head. “WAIT!”

“What?” Nebula asked, hands poised over the wound. She had a sterilized knife in hand which, great, sterile, but _wasn’t wearing gloves and probably hadn’t even washed her hands_.

“Gloves. Wash. You’ll kill her faster if you go in like that.” Which a child could have told her. His heart pounded and, when he looked over at Dan for backup, the doctor had paled. It didn’t look like he’d worked with anyone who hadn’t gone through medical school, prior to now, and Eddie added it to the mental backlog of risk factors. 

ARE WE SURE THIS IS SAFER, Venom asked. INFECTIONS KILL HUMANS EVERY DAY

“I don’t see another option, do you?”

Nebula returned from hand-washing and getting gloves and went directly to work. Widow focused her attention on the ceiling with the expression of someone who would put mind-over-matter at all costs. She took herself away, Eddie was sure of it, but he had no idea where in the Russian woman’s life would be a nice place to escape pain. 

War Machine and Stark had escaped out into the hall and had continued whatever argument they had started in the hallway. Through the medical bay’s foggy glass windows, Eddie caught a glimpse of Stark eventually sitting down on the hallway floor. He and War Machine continued talking, though War Machine’s movements became slower, more considerate. 

Nebula worked fast. Widow had grown alarmingly pale and had stopped staring at the ceiling minutes ago. She remained conscious and had closed her eyes. Eddie could only think she was consciously keeping her heart rate at the placid pace showing on the monitor. Dan appeared to have figured out the technology enough to navigate it and occasionally directed Eddie to do this or do that. Anything to keep the blood in Widow’s body from making its way to the drain in the floor. Yeah, Eddie had noticed the drain. 

TIDY

Tidy, yeah, but where the hell was the blood going if they were in the basement?

DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT EDDIE

SHE HAS NOT LOST MORE THAN 2.3 PINTS

“That’s—that’s a lot, V.” They only let you donate about a pint at a time and once you lost 30% to 40% of your blood, things reached a crisis level.

“Finished,” came Nebula’s voice from beside Widow’s body. From _Widow_ , not Widow’s body. Everyone was still fine. However, the heart monitor spiked in connection with Nebula’s announcement and Widow’s eyes opened, hazy and unfocused.

“Ready player two?” Widow asked, her voice woozy with blood loss. 

Eddie took Nebula’s place at Widow’s side and was, for once, glad of his many gory experiences with Venom. The blood, the fluid that effectively blinded him to what he was doing in Widow’s wound, didn’t bother him the way it would a year ago. There was no time even to panic, which made the process direct. He began suturing. Dan’s diagram had advised what size suture to use, the absorbable make, and the doctor gave him instructions throughout his movements while Dan monitored Widow’s vitals. 

“D-Dan, are you sure you shouldn’t be doing this?” Eddie managed, as he began working on (what his training told him was) the iliotibial band. If he screwed this up, Widow might not walk again. If that happened, he could have the entire cadre of the Avengers on his case and he just couldn’t think about that. 

“You’re working faster and steadier than I could,” Dan replied, never more than a foot away from Eddie and always giving him enough room to work. “Keep going.”

WE ARE STEADIER, Venom reminded him. Oh. Right. The guy with the powerful symbiote to steady his hands was probably better equipped to suture than a non-metahuman, regardless of the non-meta’s experience. Still. Eddie couldn’t help the feeling that he was minutes from killing Widow, seconds away from Dan shoving him aside and taking over the suturing himself – which would probably leave Eddie to be minding the vital signs and making decisions. He wasn’t equipped to do either. 

Once the iliotibial band had been sutured together and Eddie was finally getting to the surface layers of skin, the alarm began going off again. He couldn’t afford to stop suturing, though he heard Dan getting a crash cart. The blood seeping into the wound alarmed Eddie. 

“V—how much blood has she lost now?”

MORE 

“She’s going into hypovolemic shock,” Dan answered, closer to Eddie than the journalist had realized he would be. “Keep going, I’m taking care of it. Just work quickly.”

Eddie had kept working as they spoke, noticing now that Dan had put Widow on oxygen and was arranging a transfusion. He didn’t have any more time to look around; he needed to work harder, faster—

WE CAN HELP

He didn’t have a chance to respond before black tendrils were in the wound, introducing _who knew what_ foreign bodies into the open system, and knitting together the source of the bleeding. So, Eddie sutured as fast as he could. They should have been doing it this way from the beginning; Venom could direct his fingers with notations on where the suture should be, where the blood was building, what areas needed reinforcement – and quicker. 

He didn’t know how much time had passed, only that when he looked up from the closed wound, the alarm had stopped sounding. The heart monitor had stabilized. No flat line. 

She’d stabilized. 

He took a ragged breath and felt the tendrils return to their body. He knew Venom was feeling the stress of the situation as well, since their hands were trembling.

“You good?” he asked the symbiote quietly.

YES EDDIE

WE HAVE NEVER PARTICIPATED IN THAT SIDE OF IT BEFORE

“The fixing?”

FIXING SOMEONE WHO WAS NOT OUR HOST, Venom confirmed. Eddie had the strange sense of ‘pride’ again, like there had been with the Parkers’ dogs, but this was closer to pride in themselves. Pride in Eddie, pride in them as a unit, working in tandem to save a life. 

WE EVEN REMOVED THE INFECTIONS

WE LIKE THIS SKILL

“I’m a fan of it too,” Eddie murmured though, drenched in blood and dead on his feet, he liked the idea of not practicing it anymore tonight. Dan had left the room to tell War Machine and Stark that the procedure was a success. Given Dan’s following gestures at Stark and Stark’s defensive posturing, there would be at least one other wound for them to repair. 

Nebula moved to stand next to them. The woman assessed them carefully, with a warrior’s eye. 

“What are you?” she asked finally.

“Venom,” Eddie answered, moving away in order to go get cleaned up. “Human-symbiote.”

“Of Klyntar?” 

“You know about symbiotes?” 

“I know of most stories about the creatures,” Nebula said flatly. “Yours doesn’t appear to fit the mold.” 

Right. They’d originally come to take over Earth; it made sense that their home planet wouldn’t be a bastion of peace and light to the universe. Eddie nodded, disposing of the blood-stained gloves and scrubbing at the blood that had found its way further to his upper arms. He noted with some irritation that both his pants and shoes would have to be thrown out for the blood splattered on them. He kicked off the shoes and threw them away into a biohazardous bin, knowing that he wouldn’t want to wear the socks upstairs either, but he could get rid of those closer to the door upstairs. 

Nebula had taken a seat beside the Black Widow’s bed, where she kept a close eye on the medical readouts. Eddie wondered if she could actually read them or if she was just staring at the one thing she’d mentally tied to human survival, aside from ‘surgery.’

Eddie returned to the hallway to find that Dan had slipped away to use the restroom. Stark had somehow ‘vanished’ the Iron Man suit and was engaged in stitching up a long laceration on his arm. From the way he moved and what Eddie could see, bruising covered his arm up to the shoulder, congruent with the damage sustained from banging around inside a suit. 

“What happened anyway?” Eddie asked.

“Avengers’ business,” Stark said, finishing up the twelfth stitch. “Why’s the doc here?”

“He dropped by. The timing worked out,” Eddie said, and glanced over at War Machine. “Are you all right?” 

“Nothing to speak of,” War Machine said. Something about the way he said it assured Eddie that he wasn’t hiding anything, which was a nice change. He had no doubt that if Widow hadn’t been brought in, she would have hidden the wound until it ‘got better’ or she died. 

Neither of those two answers led to a continued conversation however, and Eddie wasn’t sure how much he wanted one, so he straightened and looked down the hall. 

“I’m sure you know where the bedrooms and bathrooms are so, feel free to choose any that don’t look lived in. None of the ones down here are. We’re going to head to bed.” Since he didn’t have the clearance to know about ‘Avengers’ business.’

“Hold up, Brock,” Stark said. Some part of Eddie knew that the conversation wasn’t going to go well. Between the stress of their situation or the time of night or their current company… but he shifted position to stay.

“Yup?”

“What was that in there?” 

Eddie looked aback at the medical bay, then to Stark. “I told you – I’ve been taking those medic training courses. Dan thought my— _our_ hands’d be better suited for this.”

An internal struggle played out across Stark’s face. “I know you’ve been taking the courses, I figured they were for low-level fixes.”

“We don’t run into many low-level fixes,” Eddie reminded him. Venom didn’t do things by half and most of the criminal population of San Francisco didn’t do things by half either. Unless Eddie adopted six children who ran around and consistently broke their arms or needed stitches, he wasn’t going to get much experience with ‘low-level.’ 

Stark was shaking his head. “With your abilities—”

“What abilities?” Sure, steady hands, a ‘hands-on’ approach to suturing… but he didn’t get the feeling that was what Stark was talking about.

“Your special friend has healing abilities, right?”

Eddie felt Venom stir with anger, apparently a few seconds ahead of him in grasping what Stark was saying. 

“Venom can heal themselves and their host, if that’s what you’re saying, but they can’t just heal all over the place. I think.” 

NO WE CANNOT HEAL ANYONE EXCEPT OURSELVES AND OUR HOST IS PART OF OURSELVES

“So, no, no one other than themselves and the host,” Eddie confirmed.

“But they possessed your girlfriend, that one time, right? Anne?”

“Yes, briefly, to save me. What does Anne have to do with this?”

Dan returned from the bathroom down the hall and Eddie saw him stop dead at the mention of the woman they had both loved. Damnit, he needed to find out what was up with Dan too. Having company over was exhausting. The doctor slipped inside to allow them to retain some semblance of privacy for the conversation. War Machine also rose and made some excuse to move further down the hall and make a phone call from one of the unused rooms. Which just left Eddie and Stark. 

“If the symbiote just has to be inside them for a minute…” Stark said, the hinting becoming less of a ‘hint’ and more of a ‘why wouldn’t you do the thing that’s convenient?’ hint. “Wouldn’t you want to make sure they’re taken care of properly?”

Eddie’s mind had slowly begun to move out of the haze of the surgery and into the realm of conversation and implications. He still couldn’t be sure he was hearing Stark right, but he knew what it sounded like Stark was saying.

“You wanted me to send Venom into Black Widow to heal her,” Eddie said. “As a host.”

Stark picked up on the alarm in his tone and shifted his to something a little more apologetic. “When it didn’t come up immediately, I thought there were negative side effects or something but when it looked like… like we might lose her, and you still didn’t—”

“We’re not a party trick,” Eddie said, his chest growing tight. “It’s not something Widow was capable of signing off on and not something that Venom volunteered to do. What it _is_ is dangerous to all of us. If she rejected them—or if we ever tried that with someone we didn’t know, and got separated—” 

The reason for Venom’s anger suddenly occurred to him.

“That’s why you let us stay here, isn’t it? You thought we could heal everyone that way.”

“ _No,_ Brock, I let you stay because you needed a home.” Stark sounded firm. Sounded sincere. But sometimes, Stark’s assurances sounded like Drake’s lies to his test subjects. “Sure, the healing aspect occurred to me, but if you’d prefer to talk about it more before trying anything like that—”

_’before trying’_

The statement still assumed that this option was on the table. Eddie didn’t know how to make his refusal clearer without going into some very personal parts of his and Venom’s symbiosis. Every sentence in his mind started with ‘please’ and please wouldn’t work with Stark. 

“We— _I_ can’t—”

For a journalist, being without words sucked more for him than it did for most. Eddie wanted to know what to say, how to verbally tear Stark’s head off, but the only logical reaction felt like screaming. He pushed the rage down, down, to some deep level where he couldn’t express it. The fury laid there like a sharp rock in his gut, tearing a hole that bled acid throughout him. 

EDDIE NO

STOP THAT

THAT’S NOT GOOD FOR US

But he hadn’t screamed at Stark. He hadn’t. Eddie clung to the idea even as he felt bile try to rise in his throat, as acid ran through his veins. To make matters worse, his knees were trying to fail with all the mental inattention and he couldn’t let that happen either. Stark still didn’t look like he realized what was happening, just waiting in puzzlement for whatever Eddie was trying to say. 

Instead, they become Venom.

The symbiote looked down at Stark, who was a small man to begin with and appeared smaller with Venom towering over him. 

“We are very upset,” Venom said, the symbiote’s voice more tranquil and yet more threatening than Eddie’s could hope to be.

Looking up at Venom, Stark had the intelligence to shift his tone once again. 

“I’m sorry,” Stark said, sounding stunned. “Wasn’t my intention to upset either of you.”

“We are the same. And we are upset about the same thing. You don’t understand.” It felt so strange to hear Venom give patient explanations when Eddie’s mind screamed in the background. Such a reversal. He did _want_ to calm down. Eddie wanted to be the one with the calm explanations of why expecting them to separate at the drop of a hat wasn’t possible and why Venom couldn’t just work with a ‘temporary’ host who might also be a stranger to them. He couldn’t find words for it. 

He certainly couldn’t explain the terror that if he explained this to Stark, that they wouldn’t and couldn’t do what the man wanted, they would be evicted from this house and the life they had built here. That Stark might decide to return them to where they had been before this: running, hungry, exhausted. Eddie hated that he was scared of that thought too – they had done it before, they could do it again! Or Stark might decide not to leave them alone. 

EDDIE NOTHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO US

“You’re right,” Stark was saying, growing angry. “I don’t understand. You have the ability to help people, to _save_ people like Eddie, and instead you want to run around San Francisco, kicking looters’ asses and eating their faces. When you can do the things you can, and you don’t, and then they happen…” he trailed off. Stark quietly slid down the wall to sit on the hallway floor again, with a face like he had lost a war. “They happen because of you.”

Eddie had words for that, at least, and said them through Venom’s mouth: “No, they don’t. People can’t stop everything from happening.”

Dan came out of the medical bay again, having checked on Black Widow and leaving Nebula to keep an eye on her. The doctor looked from Venom to Stark, to the general direction of where War Machine had gone.

“Venom, did Eddie get cleaned up from the surgery?” the doctor asked, deftly avoiding the minefield that was their current positions. 

The symbiote nodded.

Dan stretched and yawned, neither movement an exaggeration of his current level of exhaustion. “Then you should both be in bed. We’ve all had a long night and should do the same. There’s a cot in the medical bay so Nebula and I will alternate keeping an eye on the patient. Doctor’s orders, go find real beds.”

Stark glanced at Venom dubiously, then to Dan. “We were kind of in the middle of something. Also, how do you know Eddie again, Doctor?”

“Call me Dan. And I’m a friend of Eddie’s through, er, Anne, who you appear to know about.”

“Hearsay, mostly. A little about the symbiote part of things.” Stark shook his head. “You’re a doctor, I’m sure you have some questions about it.”

“About… symbiotes?”

“About the healing factor.”

“Oh.” Dan had to think about it. “I guess Annie did mention that she didn’t have hip trouble after she was with Venom. And she used to have a deviated septum – planned surgery for it and everything – but not after Venom.”

“And that was for… how long?” Stark asked, still sounding casual as possible.

“I don’t follow,” Dan replied, looking genuinely puzzled. “The hip trouble?”

“How long was she possessed?” 

Venom growled at the term and Eddie knew he had to start being the responsible one. 

‘look I’ll talk to them’

YOU’RE STILL ANGRY

‘not as angry as I was—’

WE CAN FEEL THE ANGER

WHY DO YOU DO THIS

WOULD IT HARM THAT MUCH TO GET ANGRY AT THE TINY MORON

‘yes it might!’ 

Eddie could feel Venom flip through the background of his thoughts as if they were cards in a rolodex. Whatever the symbiote found there appeared to satisfy them that Eddie was behaving logically.

FINE

Venom dropped him back into their body and promptly went off to sulk. Eddie, on the other hand, had to give in to the sudden weakness of his knees and slide down the wall to sit on the floor. Dan was in the middle of answering ‘about four hours, I think? Eddie would know when he got Venom back.’ Then the doctor had crouched next to Eddie, checking his pulse and wearing a distinct expression of alarm. 

“Shit, Dan, checking my pulse? I think I can still fog a mirror,” Eddie joked.

“Forgive me for being concerned when people stop and change into their alter egos in the middle of an argument, then come back and immediately fall to the floor.” For the first time that night, Dan sounded a little irritated with the situation. “Everyone. Needs to go. To bed. Right now.”

Eddie pushed himself to his feet, remembering as he did so that he still needed to throw these pants away. Blood, everywhere blood and he had just been smearing it into the tile. God, that was disgusting.

“I didn’t know Annie got better, after Venom,” Eddie said, to distract himself from the blood. “Did she stop getting sinus infections?” 

“Yeah. She finally ran that marathon too.” Dan’s smile looked sad enough that it could have been accompanied by tears. 

God, Eddie missed her. Not even in a romantic way, he just missed everything she was. God. 

‘thanks buddy,’ Eddie told Venom. ‘for healing her’

SHE WAS IMPORTANT

BESIDES WE RAN BETTER WITHOUT STABBING PAIN IN OUR HIP AND TROUBLE BREATHING

The symbiote might say that as a cover story, but they wouldn’t have had to deal with those issues for more than a couple of hours. They had plagued Anne for years. 

When Eddie finally directed his attention to Stark, he found that the billionaire had already left for one of the bedrooms. Eddie got to his feet automatically and would’ve moved to follow him to continue their argument, if Dan hadn’t caught his shoulder.

“If he’s willing to continue this in the morning, I really think you should agree to continue it in the morning,” Dan said. The doctor wasn’t nearly as strong as the symbiotic pair, but strong enough that Eddie’s normal strength would have struggled against his grip. 

“You on his side now?” Eddie muttered, but stopped pushing. 

“I’m on the side of people sleeping and recovering. You know, there’s a line from a TV show—”

“If it’s from NCIS, you’re not allowed to spend the night here.”

“It’s from How I Met Your Mother. ‘Nothing good happens after 2 a.m.’ And having done a lot of emergency readings and procedures, I can confirm that nothing does. Except maybe in the maternity ward.”

“It’s just talking, Dan.”

“I’ve seen people come to the conclusion that they were getting a divorce in the morning because of conversations past 2 a.m.”

“Then they were probably getting one anyway,” Eddie sneered. Dan was right about one thing: it was too late at night to be charitable. 

Dan just looked at him, brow furrowed. The couple hours spent here had not improved the doctor’s original status of ‘looking like shit’ and Eddie realized, for the dozenth time, that he still hadn’t found out what all that was about. And now Dan would refuse to discuss it. 

“Fine,” Eddie muttered. “We’ll talk in the morning. Do you need any help with—”

“No. Go to bed.” Dan mustered up a little more energy from who-knew-where. “Thanks for your good work tonight.” 

“’s just sutures.” Eddie headed for the stairs. 

“I meant all of it,” Dan said. So he knew about Venom’s vigilante antics, Eddie reflected. One less thing to explain, at least. 

He stumbled through the upstairs, pulled off his socks and threw them away as well as replacing his pants before he performed any of the other ‘shutting up the house’ routine. He left the hallway light on in case anyone came up, but turned off the rest of them. Eddie double- and triple-checked the front door lock before pushing the panel that would close up the downstairs secret passage. The downstairs open hatch had been much better marked and no one should spend much time searching for it when they wanted to come upstairs. After all, most of the point was to keep people from finding the downstairs. 

As he turned away from the entertainment center, Eddie’s gaze fell on the bag of wine, now tinged with early morning sunlight on the glass. 

What had Dan wanted?

He sat down next to the bag of wine on the couch, as Venom began grumbling, and checked the inside for a card. Maybe it was Eddie’s birthday? No, they were nowhere close to January 21st and most people would lead with that information at the door. It wasn’t the six-month or one-year anniversary of the Snap, it wasn’t the date Eddie had first proposed to Anne, it wasn’t her—

Oh.

Eddie leaned back against the couch, feeling as if the life had been knocked out of him. He didn’t need to check his phone for the date. Yesterday had been March 1st. Annie’s birthday.

It must be the first time – no, it must _have been_ the first time Dan spent it without her since they got together. The doctor probably still lived in that grief-driven state where reminders of the life they were building together laid him low. Hell, Eddie would have been laid low if he had remembered what day it was but no, like a fucking moron, he had let the days run into one another. 

‘I didn’t mean doing well in general. I meant today,’ Dan had said, then blew it off with how it was ‘a long time ago for you two.’ Dan came for solace. Eddie threw him into a warzone. Stupid. Stupid stupid.

ARE YOU ALMOST DONE WITH THIS PITY PARTY

Eddie buried his head in his arms. Then, thinking better of the uncomfortable if cathartic posture, he pulled the hood of his hoodie over his head and curled up on the couch. 

EDDIE

BED IS LESS THAN THIRTY FEET AWAY

The symbiote growled low in their throat.

YOU KNOW WE WON’T SLEEP WELL HERE

Eddie bit back a comment about how he didn’t deserve to sleep well. Venom heard it anyway, they always did, but the symbiote didn’t comment. They waited a couple of minutes before carefully moving the bag of wine, which Eddie had been trying to avoid kicking off the couch, onto the carpeted floor. Eddie stretched out a little, the unrecognized source of stress now relocated, and didn’t otherwise move.

Another couple of minutes slipped by before Eddie heard Venom turn on the television. After the initial blare of noise where Mrs. Valdez had left it, the symbiote reduced the volume to a level where it was little more than white noise in the back of Eddie’s mind. He turned over to reduce the flash of colors on the screen against the inside of his eyelids but, face pressed into the couch cushions, he couldn’t breathe. 

After noticing his distress, Venom resolved this problem by draping a tendril over his eyes, approximating the effects of a sleep mask. Eddie stiffened for a moment before remembering it was Venom – Venom, who did this to help, who would remove it if Eddie needed it gone, it certainly wasn’t a method of preparing to gouge out his eyes—yikes, where had that come from? 

Even Venom shuddered, withdrawing the tendril instinctively.

EDDIE WE WOULDN’T—

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. It’s not you.” He fumbled to stroke the symbiote’s floating head, which had been comfortably watching television before Eddie all but told them, apropos of nothing, that he thought they wanted to blind him. 

“It’s not you,” he repeated, closing his eyes and continuing to stroke the symbiote as one would pet a cat, with the same intention of comforting and being comforted. “You did good. It’s just me. You did good. I’m sorry.”

He knew the intrusive thought was his first indication that no friendly dreams were waiting.


End file.
